Long before there was a stage on Main Street for concerts, or a “Joyner Field” for craft shows, a town landowner designated a piece of his property for the entertainment of local residents.

Lester Thomas owned Pierceville in the early 1900s. There, he operated a dairy farm and sold milk throughout the town.

You don’t hear much else about Mr. Thomas when Smithfield history is discussed. There are only a couple of references to him in Segar Cofer Dashiell’s “Pictorial History” of the town. 

What appears to be the most exciting reference to Thomas is the role his property played in 1918, when an airplane from Langley Field visited Smithfield. Town fathers did their best to guide the pilot onto the ballfield at Smithfield High School, where a large crowd had gathered to watch this historic event. But the pilot apparently found that site a bit too small — or perhaps too crowded — and instead set his plane down in “Luster Thomas’ cow pasture,” which was located across Cary Street from the school. (His name is even spelled differently in the few references there are. He appears as both Lester and Luster at various times.)

Pierceville was much diminished from its original size when Thomas was milking cows in a dairy barn there. Originally, it had flanked the entire northwestern edge of the town, from beyond the current Smithfield Bypass to the Pagan River where Smithfield Foods is located, and was several times larger than the town that Arthur Smith had laid out. In fact, its early 20th century owner, O.G. Delk, had contributed greatly to the town’s growth when he made available for development land on the future Grace, Cary James and Washington streets as well as the location of the original Smithfield High School.

That which was left — about 125 acres of cropland and pastures, plus some woods and marshland — formed the Pierceville that Lester Thomas farmed from the early 20th century until his death in 1946.

There’s no record of when or why Thomas came up with the idea of offering a corner of his property for public events. There was no “grand opening” or ribbon cutting. Those rites were pretty much unheard of back then. 

Instead, “Thomas Lot” just began appearing in newspaper announcements of events in 1930. That didn’t answer the why, of course, but the year might. Much of the world was sinking into what would be known as the Great Depression in 1930, and Smithfield wasn’t immune.

It’s very possible that Mr. Thomas, like everybody else, needed cash. In fact, he had offered up Pierceville for sale the previous year. In September 1929, he ran an ad in The Smithfield Times saying bluntly, “My farm is for rent or sale next year.” He listed the assets: “66 acres of good stock grazing and 60 acres of good open land” as well as the nine-room dwelling, dairy barn and “plenty of outbuildings.”

Clearly, there were no takers in those troubled financial times, so Mr. Thomas moved to what may have been his Plan B — hosting events. 

Pierceville was located just beyond the corporate limits of Smithfield at that time. The entrance to the farm was in the low area known universally as Joe White’s Bottom. Grace Street, which now joins Main Street at the Bottom, wasn’t built until about 1960, and the area where it’s now located, down the hill from the Pierceville house, was the location Lester Thomas designated as the “Thomas Lot,” or at other times, “Thomas Show Lot.”

The first public event I could find advertised on Thomas’ site was the Al F. Wheeler New Model Show, which was billed as “the only circus of its magnitude that still retains the parade features of circus day.” I’m guessing that was a rather slick way of describing a “small” circus, since Ringling Brothers was going strong at the time.

The Oct. 2, 1930 ad, undoubtedly placed by the circus, actually aggrandized the lot, saying the parade would leave “the Lester Thomas show grounds” and proceed through town.

Al Wheeler’s show was quickly followed by Col. M.L. Baker’s Tent Show later in October of that year, offering live entertainment as well as “real up-to-date and good moving pictures in a “high class tented theatre.”

And then — nothing. For the next five years, there appear to have been no publicized events at the Thomas Lot.

Contributing to the hiatus may have been the highly successful “Four County Fair” held during that period in Suffolk and featuring prominent entertainment each fall.

Five years later, though, in the fall of 1935, Thomas again began scheduling entertainment events at the entrance to Pierceville. They included small traveling circuses, most in town for a single day, as well as a “Broadway Review” in 1939.

Local PTAs used the site for annual harvest festivals, generally including a small circus, and those events continued up until the middle of the century, the last one advertised being in 1954. 

Not long after that, a large portion of the Thomas Lot was taken up by the town to connect Grace and Main streets. Thus ended what appears to have been Smithfield’s first formal events site.

 

John Edwards is publisher emeritus of The Smithfield Times. His email address is j.branchedwards@gmail.com.