Thomaston

Army of the Cumberland and George Thomas Source - www.AotC.net

HOME

Archive

Photos

Facts

News

Chronology AotC

Battles & Reports

Overview

Links

.

Thomaston - Birthplace of Gen. George H. Thomas
photos and essay

Thomaston is about 2 miles east of Newsoms, VA and near the N.C. border in the Virginia tidewater region.

Leave I-95 at Emporia, VA, take US-58 east 23 miles, turn south on VA-35, then left on Grays Shop Rd. into Newsoms. From there, head east toward Franklin on General Thomas Hwy. (Hwy. 671) for 2 miles. Turn left onto Cypress Bridge Rd. (Hwy. 674), then turn left immediately onto Thomaston Rd. Thomaston is a white private home at 2837 Chickamauga Dr. and is indicated by an historical marker. . From Franklin take VA-671 west (Gen. Thomas Hwy.) for 9 miles, turn right onto Cypress Bridge Rd. (Hwy. 674), then take first left on Hwy. 709 to Chickamauga Dr.

To make an appointment to visit Thomaston contact John Skeeters at <jskeets1@earthlink.net>.

The Rawls Public Library in Courtland, VA (757-653-2821, webmaster@blackwaterlib.org) has a collection of articles written locally about Thomas. Contact Shelley Huntington.


Front view of Thomaston. The original part where Thomas was born, is behind.	Front view showing 300 year old oak tree on left. An acorn was the symbol Thomas chose for his favored XIV Corps.	Back view of house. When Thomas was born the house only had 3 rooms (the part surrounded by the blue line. The other parts were added later.	Schoolhouse behind Thomaston



The monument in the Thomas family graveyard next to Thomaston The 4th side is blank and therefore not shown here. The other 3 sides show the names of the Thomas parents (John and Elizabeth, né Rochelle), and 7 of the 9 children. George is buried in Troy, NY, and Benjamin is perhaps buried in Vicksburg where he lived after the war. According to Wilbur Thomas (General George H. Thomas, pg. 48), "John William was the eldest child; Judith Elvira, the second; Benjamin, the third; and George Henry, the subject of this work, the fourth. Unfortunately, the remaining children cannot be placed in their order of birth." His source were the Mattie R. Tyler Papers in the Southampton County Courthouse. However, since the children on the one side of the monument are arranged in order of birth, it is reasonable to assume that the stonemason had received instructions. The complete order would thus be as follows: 1. John William 2. Judith Elvira (died 1903) 3. Benjamin 4. George Henry (born 31 July 1816, died in San Francisco 28 March 1870) 5. Anne 6. Francis G. (Fanny, died 1902) 7. Lucy Briggs (né Thomas) 8. Elizabeth 9. Juliett Exact dates of birth and death of the other 8 children would be appreciated. - Bob Redman


Plaque located in front of Thomaston	Plaque on Highway 58 between Courtland and Franklin	The Rochelle house in Courtland, home of Thomas' mother Elizabeth	Interior view of the Rochelle house with well-kept period furnishings

View of the Courtland County courthouse today	The courthouse as it looked when Thomas read law there, from a painting in the Rochelle house. Nat Turner was tried here.	The Southampton County Historical Society maintains a display in the courthouse. In the case are books and publications about the county. The portrait is of Colgate Darden, Jr. (governor of Virginia 1942-46), who was a champion of Thomas.	Display case in courthouse with Indian artifacts

Bring Thomas Home

by Bob Redman, 11 Aug. 2003

According to Earasmus Darwin Keyes, Thomas' superior at Ft. Lauderdale in 1832: "There is a moral in the life and services of Thomas. He was strictly conscientious, he loved Virginia, and his affections for the South were strong. He was warm also to the Union."¹

According to Thomas Buell: "When the Tennessee campaign ended, Thomas had performed the unsurpassed masterpiece of theater command and control of the Civil War. So modern in concept, so sweeping in scope, it would become a model for strategic maneuver in twentieth-century warfare."²⁰

Today, 142 years after Virginia seceded from the Union on 17 July 1861 and then Col. George H. Thomas of Southampton County did not follow his state, but rather his oath, he is still a controversial figure among those who remember him. He is largely overlooked in popular presentations of the Civil War, and utterly ignored in our nation’s middle- and high-school history textbooks. He might get a paragraph in a college textbook. This is the case in spite of his having been the most successful general on either side. He never lost an engagement where he really commanded. In short, he was the rock of a lot of places besides Chickamauga, where on 20 Sept. 1863 he rallied 25,000 Union soldiers to hold off 60,000 Confederates long enough to permit the Union army to make an ordered retreat, or advance according to some commentators, to the real objective of the battle - Chattanooga. At Murfreesboro (31 Dec. 1862) his presence at the center was absolutely decisive in staving off Bragg’s attack,² and nobody but Thomas could have parried Hood’s attack at Peachtree Creek (20 Aug. 1864). This was the real battle of Atlanta, downgraded by Sherman in his own interest³ to Hood’s “first sortie.” In addition, Thomas was more like a hammer, and a heavy one at that, at Mill Springs, the first major Union victory of the war (19 Jan. 1862), at Tullahoma (22-29 June 1863) where, under Thomas, the Spencer repeating rifle was first used on a large scale, at the decisive battle of Chattanooga (23-25 Nov. 1864)⁴ where he managed the battle behind Grant's back and saved Grant's career, and at Nashville (15-16 Dec. 1864) where he was both hammer and anvil.⁵ To learn more about these battles go to my Battles and Reports page. He achieved these successes by dint of decades of hard work and study. While other officers out on the frontier gambled, drank, tried to grow potatoes, and messed with the cash box, Thomas conducted botanical, zoological, and topographical studies and composed a first dictionary of the language of the Yuma Indians. While sitting on court martial boards he became an expert in military law. From the smallest skirmish with Indians to the battle of Buena Vista he drew his conclusions about the principles of engagement. During the Civil War he embraced the latest technologies while applying timeless military principles – train your men well and take care of them, do your best to make your opponent attack you, by all means know more than your opponent, and pierce the center only after at least one of the flanks has been turned. He also gave a good example to his men by never taking a single day of leave during the entire war, and by sharing their dangers. He introduced battlefield procedures which today are part of standard military doctrine. While still training cavalry troops in Carlisle, PA, before the first battle of Bull Run, he wrote a memorandum to Winfield Scott outlining his strategy for winning the war – Cut the Confederacy in two by driving through East Tennessee on Chattanooga.⁶ It took him 2 ½ years along a different route, but when nobody else could or would do it, he did it himself. As it turned out, this was the strategy which broke the stalemate in Virginia. Perhaps most significantly, wherever he commanded, even at the battle of Nashville, the rate of casualties was relatively low - on both sides. His object was not to annihilate an enemy, but rather to disorganize an opponent. To learn more about his accomplishments, go to my Salient Facts page.

His record earned him little credit from some Union generals like Grant who feared Thomas as a rival for top command, and toward the end of the war Grant, not one of whose battles bears close inspection,⁷ began a campaign to diminish Thomas’ reputation which he pursued as long as he lived. After he died, Grant’s biographers continued in this vein and shaped the historiography of the Civil War with the results described above. It is true that Thomas' uncommon ability was recognized and appreciated by many people in high places in and outside of Washington during the war, but nevertheless his promotions came slowly. One reason for this was his lack of a state political machine to watch over his fortunes. He'd left that behind when he opted for the Union. But let us be charitable toward the politicians. Commissions to high rank were scarce, and the horde aspiring thereto was huge. In their mostly undocumented back-room discussions they may well have said, "Let the Virginian wait. He will do his duty and get the job done anyway."

If you follow the currents of the internecine political battles fought on both sides, Grant’s behavior was predictable and even understandable. Every war tosses up desperate adventurers. The concomitant rejection of Thomas by most Southerners, and by some Southern students of the Civil War even today, is equally understandable, but the reasons for it are perhaps more complex. The obvious assertion that Thomas betrayed his “country”, i.e. the State of Virginia, falls short when we consider that other prominent Virginians like Gen. Winfield Scott and Admiral David Farragut also opted for the Union, without becoming the objects of the denigration or even vilification to which Thomas was subjected. While Scott's stout unionism was a comfort to Northerners, and Farragut's war contributions were stellar, someone else in their position would have done much the same thing. What really rankled the Southerners in Thomas' case was the fact that he was irreplaceable.⁸

Today much of the heated discussion of the past has been replaced with a calmer assessment of Thomas, but at the very center of this assessment, Thomas’ home area – Southampton County – there is still a strong ambivalence toward its most prominent native son. This ambivalence can be explained by several factors, perhaps the first of which was the ambivalence of Southampton County itself to the whole question of secession. In fact, according to a local resident, in the vote (among property owners of course) to ratify secession, Southampton County split in half. The half of the county in which Thomas grew up was decidedly against secession, so Thomas wasn’t really acting against the sentiments of many of his neighbors.

There were no typical plantations in this part of Virginia because its widespread swamps precluded large-scale agriculture. For example, the Thomas family holding at around 500 acres and 15 slaves was one of the larger units in the county. Therefore the interest of many Southampton County residents diverged from that of most members of Virginia's ruling political class.

There is also reason to believe that he acted less against the sentiments of his family than is commonly asserted:

1) After the war Thomas demonstrably maintained amicable relations with his brother Benjamin, and there is no proof that there had ever been a rupture. When some lost-cause members of the new Tennessee legislature proposed to sell a portrait of Thomas hanging in the state capitol building, Benjamin tried to buy it.⁹ In 1869, before leaving from Nashville for his final duty station in California, Thomas sent a former slave (whom he had acquired for his wife when stationed in Texas before the war, left at Thomaston during the war, and brought to Nashville at the end of the war), along with her family, to Benjamin’s care in Vicksburg where he lived at the time.¹⁰

2) The stories about Judith and Fanny, the last surviving sisters, according to which they kept George’s portrait turned to the wall, considered him to have died when he abandoned Virginia, and so forth, are probably exaggerated. Dr. W.D. Barham, Judith’s physician, reported that the sisters were mortified by such rumors, and that they felt more sorrowful than angered at their brother’s decision. According to the physician, the sisters also sent acorns from the enormous oak tree (see photo above) in front of their house in order to be planted around Thomas’ equestrian statue at Thomas Circle in Washington, DC.¹¹

The county as a whole, or even the South, might have rejected the idea of secession if a person named Nat Turner hadn’t burned the question of slavery into the people’s minds when he began his insurrection on 21 Aug. 1831, during which he and the band of other disaffected slaves he had gathered up killed 55 whites – men, women, and children. Claiming to have received divine inspiration, he began his campaign, the largest one of its kind in U.S. history, within just a few miles of the Thomas family farm. Some slaves joined Turner, others fought against him. Thomas’ mother led her family to safety in Courtland and was helped to do so by some of her own slaves, according to local tradition. Thomas was 15 years old at the time, and as he later reflected on his experience fleeing along Cypress Bridge Road through Mill Swamp, he came to a different conclusion than did many of his countrymen. This terrifying episode was implanted so forcefully into the collective memories of the people of that area, that even today it is a standard topic of discussion and memorialized in road signs (Blackhead Signpost Road, Greenhead Road, etc.).¹²

Fear is a poison which can exercise its force on a body politic for decades and even centuries after the original cause of that fear has been overcome or even forgotten. Since most people tend to overestimate their own “freedom of choice” and to discount the long-term effects of such determining influences, they find themselves in quandary when asked by a disinterested observer about what really motivates them to take certain stances in political and social disputes.

With time, however, some people slowly begin to question the accepted certainties of the past. For example, recently a Southhampton County resident, touching on the insurrection without any prompting from me, said, “Nat Turner was a fanatic. But considering that he was a slave, it’s hard to hold it against him.” Nobody was more aware of the enormity of what he had done than Turner himself. The trackless Great Dismal Swamp beckoned a mere 30 miles away, but after the carnage he hid near home for 70 days, and then gave himself up to trial and gallows. Under the frustration of a lifetime of not being taken seriously he had snapped and set in motion a process which snuffed out the lives of 55 people who were also trapped in that unfortunately contrived social system, along with the lives of the insurrectionists and of other blacks simply found off their farms at the wrong time. Cursed be the lot of the slave, and well as that of the master.

For whatever reason, since the end of the Civl War, a debate about Thomas has been carried out among the residents of Southampton County. He has had his local champions, such as Colgate Darden, Jr., governor of Virginia 1942-46 (see portrait above). Plaques have been erected and dedicated with public ceremony, a road has been named after him (General Thomas Highway). Money has been collected in order to refurbish Thomas’ gravesite in Troy, NY. Efforts were even made to have his body brought back to Virginia for reburial. Occasionally a tourbus finds its way to Thomaston. On the other hand, Thomas’ ceremonial sword, given to him by Southampton County notables in recognition of his performances in Florida and in the Mexican War, remains in a Richmond museum. Another of his swords (some ordinary duty sword or the Mill Springs sword?) remains locked up in a vault in Franklin, no portrait of Thomas hangs in a public place,¹³ no center devoted to his study has been established, no school has been named after him, and no statue of him stares out over the Nottaway River from the park beside the courthouse.

In his Memoirs Sherman predicted that large numbers of Southerners would someday be making pilgrimages to Virginia to honor Thomas’ memory. That has not taken place, at least not to the extent he perhaps envisioned, but it can be argued that something more subtle has taken place. In a speech given 14 years after the war Gen. Irvin McDowell said:

"Is it not, indeed, an immortal glory for Virginia to have produced the noblest soldier of the Revolution and the noblest that fought for the North in the Civil War, as well as the noblest that fought for the South? I hope some day to see her erect a worthy monument to one of the greatest of her sons. But, as she grows every year richer, more prosperous, more fortunate, more loyal in the Union for which he helped to save her, she herself, whether she wills it or not, will more and more become his proudest monument.^"14

Toward the end of the war Grant asked Thomas about the best route for one of his armies to take through Virginia. Although the most direct way would have been through Southampton County, Thomas recommended another. After the war Thomas arranged that the army should deliver supplies to the county, and took no credit for the act. The man who protected Southhampton Country from afar, said this about the conduct of Union soldiers when in enemy territory:

"We must remember that this is a civil war, fought to preserve the Union that is based on brotherly love and patriotic belief in the one nation. It is bad enough for us to demand that love of a restored Union at the point of the bayonet, but we can justify ourselves by claiming what we do is from a sense of duty. The thing becomes horribly grotesque, however, when from ugly feeling we visit on helpless old men, women, and children the horrors of a barbarous war. We must be as considerate and kind as possible, or we will find that in destroying the rebels we have destroyed the Union.^"15

From this exposition it should already be clear that Thomas deserves more consideration than he gets from most Virginians and many Southhampton County residents. But there are still other considerations.

In 1864, in a harbinger of what European governments had in mind for America should a power vacuum result here, Napoleon III established Archduke Maxmillian on a throne in Mexico City. According to Wilbur Thomas (no relation), "it is but realistic to conclude that but for the Northern victory other nations would have attempted to gain a foothold elsewhere in this hemisphere."¹⁶ And in the furtherance of such plans it would have been only natural for them to encourage yet more fragmentation on the North American continent. The chaos of, and the violence inherent in such a situation is easy to imagine. Thomas may well have had this danger in mind as he fought to save the Union, and as he struggled to fulfill what was perhaps his driving personal ambition - to found the modern army.

You read correctly - ambition, normal human pride. If we consider in this light every step he took, every promotion he either accepted, rejected, or postponed, every subordinate he rehabilitated or allowed to be sidelined, every slight he swallowed and every personal sacrifice he made, including leaving Virginia, the outline of quite a healthy ego emerges. The denial of this creates problems of analysis, and the acceptance of it solves them. He could not fulfill his ambition while adhering to the Confederacy, because it didn't have the requisite resources and industrial infrastructure. He also could not reach this goal and allow his emotions much external play. Some authors have quoted him as saying, the occasion varying, "I have taken a great deal of pains to educate myself not to feel."¹⁷ If he actually said this, it was a lapse, because all he, or anyone could or can do, is to learn to control the expression of one's feelings. He paid a heavy price for burying his emotions while serving the public weal, but he would have paid a different price had he offered his services to the South. The archaic command structure of which Bragg ran afoul would have blocked him at every turn, and he perhaps would have borne the frustration less well than Bragg did. But where is it written that life is supposed to be simple?

It is no contradiction to suggest that the model public servant George Henry Thomas was extraordinarily personally ambitious. The Army of the Cumberland was his work of art which he created, nutured, and protected as long as he could against all encroachments, and this in the long-range interest of both Southerners and Northerners, in fact of the entire nation and all races of our nation. Toward the end Sherman threw it against "breastworks twelve feet thick" at Kennesaw Mountain, and finally took it away from him. And Thomas put up with that too because, except for two final challenges – Wilson's cavalry raid to Selma and the experiment of practical reconstruction¹⁸ – his work was done. The Union was saved, and his reforms and innovations were already institutionalized.

Ask yourself this question: Where would we be today without this army? The answer to the question, or at least the answer to the reverse of that question – Where would we not be? – is obvious and should move us to focus more attention on the creator of that army. The English have honored their great pioneer Wellington,¹⁹ and our society would have in Thomas a comparable figure to hold up for study and emulation, if he were given his due.²⁰ Since the political general Grant does not qualify for this role, we are at the moment the poorer for it.

Those of us who would like to remedy this situation should come to terms with reality. An entire country, an entire educational bureaucracy, an entire academic establishment, are such large and inert structures that they are impossible to modify from without. In order to modify them from within, a start has to made somewhere, and the best, easiest, and most significant place to start is Virginia and, in Virginia, the county of his birth.

I hope I will be forgiven for making the following exhortation to the people of Virginia and Southampton County, which I do with respect and kindly feeling toward them: Do something positive to demonstrate to the world that you have understood Thomas' singular contribution to our nation. Leave him buried where he is, but track down descendants of the Thomas family. Interview every single person in the county with roots going back to the Southampton of that period in order to unearth hidden documentation and save what can still be learned from oral tradition. Come to terms with his decision to return south at the head of his men. Bring George Thomas' memory home.

Notes:

1. Keyes, "Fifty Years' Observation of Men and Events," 1884, pg. 166.

2. Gen. Braxton Bragg, the best possible authority in this matter, confirms this opinion in his battle report: "Numbering at least two to our one, he [Rosecrans] was enabled to bring fresh troops at every point to resist our progress, and he did so with a skill and judgment which has ever characterized his aide commander [Thomas]. (O.R. ser. # 29, pg. 665)

3. Anyone who entertains the idea that Sherman was a friend to Thomas should consider the following quote from a letter which Sherman wrote on 27 April 1864 (in a period of relative calm between campaigns) to former Senator Thomas Ewing, his adoptive father and father-in-law: "At Chattanooga Grant was with Thomas in person—he held back Thomas' troops till Hooker got into position—we were delayed by Chattanooga Creek impassable that day without a Bridge to construct which took time, 4 hours. If we were to dispose of such men as Thomas summarily who would take his place? We are not masters as Napoleon was. He could make & unmake on the Spot. We must take the tools provided us, and in the order prescribed by Rank of which the Law judges." (Thomas Ewing and Family Papers) This mendacious passage from the pen of a person who lost every battle or portion of a battle where he commanded, who owed his rank to his brother U.S. Senator John Sherman, is an obvious expression of seething resentment against a man whom he recognized as his better. Note that it was the other way around at Chattanooga. Thomas delayed carrying out Grant's flawed order until he knew that Hooker had turned Bragg's left flank, and the head of Hooker's column immediately got across on the remains of the burned bridge .

4. Jefferson Davis after the war: "Chattanooga was the key to the situation, and its loss was terrible to the Confederacy. Our only comfort was, that the people at Washington did not know what to do with it."(Donn Piatt, "General George H. Thomas: A Critical Biography," 1893, pg. 509.

5. According to Thomas Buell ("Warrior Generals", pg. xxxii): "The Battle of Nashville was the paradigm of the Civil War, for it pitted the army of the future against the army of the past." Thomas applied everything he had learned during the war, and Hood demonstrated that he had learned little.

6. CSA General D.H. Maury's estimation of Thomas at Nashville: "I have never heard anybody who was in Hood's army justify the complaint that Thomas was slow....The army, with which Thomas gained his great victory, was largely made up of forces detached for the occasion from other armies, of new levies and of dismounted cavalry, some of whom were remounted in presence of the enemy, and was therefore ill-fitted to cope with the veteran army of Hood. So impatient was the Federal Government of the delay of Thomas in attacking Hood, that on the 9th of December he was ordered to be relieved from the command of the army. The order was, fortunately for Halleck, suspended. Thomas would not attack till he was ready. His victory was decisive....In calm review of these operations, it is but fair to say that in the whole course of the war, there was no finer illustration of generalship exhibited by any Federal commander than General Thomas' defense of Nashville." (Southern Historical Society Papers, June l876)

7. Grant's Vicksburg campaign is almost universally praised, even though he suffered 90,000 casualites which he hid from the War Department. Most of them died or became cripples for life before the actual battles began, i.e. during the attempts to dig 3 canals through malarial swamps which Grant admitted were make-work projects or, in his words, "a series of experiments to consume time, and to divert the attention of the enemy, of my troops and of the public generally" (Memoirs, pg. 232). They all failed because Grant hadn't the faintest notion of hydrology. In Dec. 1862 he had abruptly broken off a perfectly feasible approach to Vicksburg along the railroad east of the Mississippi because of a minor raid to his rear, but mainly because McClernand seemed to be getting political traction with the wierd idea of going around on the western bank. A look at a modern road map of Louisiana shows even today a paucity of roads on the western bank of the Mississippi. There is a reason for this. During his famous march to the interior, Grant launched 4 utterly useless frontal assaults, 1 at Champion's Hill, and 3 at Vicksburg itself. He was fortunate that the indecisive Joseph Johnston was in some sort of command at Jackson. Finally, Vicksburg would have fallen by itself within weeks of the fall of Chattanooga. The main positive value of Grant's Vicksburg campaign lay in the fact that Bragg's forces at Murfreesboro and Tullahoma were weakened to reinforce Pemberton. He could have accomplished the same purpose with something less spectacular but much more salutary, say parking his command for the winter at Grenada, Miss., but then he wouldn't have become president.

8. According to Boatner (pg. 495), there were 16 Northern-born graduates of West Point who fought for the South. All had married into Southern families. Among them were Bushrod Johnson (Ohio), John Pemberton (Pennsylvania), and Josiah Gorgas (Pennsylvania). Gorgas became the Confederacy's Chief of Ordnance, and his achievements in that role were essential to the Confederate war effort. There were 162 graduates of West Point who were born in seceding states and fought for the Union. Winfield Scott, born in Virginia, did not go to West Point. From the exchange, the South gained more generals, but the North gained many more engineers.

9. Francis McKinney, "Education in Violence - The Life of George H. Thomas and the History of the Army of the Cumberland," 1961, pg. 460. In the end, the legislators came to their senses and kept the portrait. It remains in Nashville to this day.

10. Thomas Van Horne, "The Life of Major General George H. Thomas, 1882, pg. 17.

11. W.D. Barham, “Recollections of the Thomas Family of Southampton County,” Virginia Historical Magazine, Richmond, Vol. XL, pg. 334 (1932).

12. The Southampton County Historical Society has produced two excellent video documentaries about the Nat Turner insurrection, a 4 tape set for $75 plus $6 postage and a single tape for $35 plus $6 dollars postage. Contact Milton Futrell at P. O. Box 407, Courtland, VA 23837.

13. A portrait of Lee hangs at West Point.

14. Society of the Army of the Cumberland,Yearbook of 1879, pp. 75-76.

15. Piatt, pg. 502.

16. "General George H. Thomas, the Indomitable Warrior," 1963. pg. 309. Many observers shared this opinion. From many I cite this statement by gen. Edward Alexander, Longstreet's chief of artillery: "Had our cause succeeded, divergent interests must soon have further separated the States into groups, and this continent would have been given over to divided nationalities, each weak and unable to command foreign credit" ("Military Memoirs of a Confederate").

17. Wilbur Thomas, pg. 604; Richard O'Connor, "Thomas, Rock of Chickamauga," 1948, pg. 195, and others.

18. McKinney, pg. 448: "Among the military commanders in the South, Thomas was pre-eminent in the work of reconstruction."

19. Wellington always posted his main force behind a ridge out of sight of the enemy. He used this tactic in Spain to defeat a whole series of French commanders, and then again to defeat Napoleone Buonaparte himself who apparently had not discussed Wellington with his marshals or even read their reports. As Wellington said in surprise during the battle of Waterloo: "Damn the fellow, he is a mere pounder after all." Beware of the pounders who propose to send (not lead) you forward to glory.

20. Thomas Buell, "Warrior Generals," pg. 388: "When the Tennessee campaign ended, Thomas had performed the unsurpassed masterpiece of theater command and control of the Civil War. So modern in concept, so sweeping in scope, it would become a model for strategic maneuver in twentieth-century warfare."

-------------------------

Writings from and about Southampton County:

Bessie Thomas Shands, “General George H. Thomas,” Southampton Historical Society Bulletin, No.4, 1980
Dan Balfour, “Franklin & Southampton in the Civil War,” 2002, ISBN 1561901504
Dan Balfour, “A sketch of the Life of General George H. Thomas,” Southampton Historical Society Bulletin, No. 5, March 1983
Daniel W. Crofts, “Old Southampton – Politics and Society in a Virginia City,” 1992, ISBN 08139138353

Berryville, VA is located off I-81 just east of Winchester in northern Virginia. Thanks are owed to the Civil War Society of Berryville for making this gesture to bring Thomas home.