Establishment
With the outbreak of the Civil War and the bombardment of Fort Sumter in South Carolina, President Abraham Lincoln called for 100,000 volunteers to put down the growing rebellion. Colonel Henry B. Carrington had been commissioned to raise troops for the expanded United States Army in Ohio, Indiana, and Pennsylvania. In July 1861, he established a training camp on the Solomon Beers farm along the Delaware Road, four miles north of the city of Columbus. He named the new facility "Camp Thomas" in honor of Colonel Lorenzo Thomas, the Adjutant General of the U.S. Army. Camp Thomas augmented the nearby Camp Chase, a similar military camp established for the state's regiments raised for the volunteer Union Army. The camp was located on property owned by Soloman Beers, north of the present day Dodrige Street.
Temporary structures were erected for the new camp's headquarters, as well as the guard room and hospital. Streets were lined out and tents erected as shelters for the incoming new recruits, who began arriving in mid-August. Among the prominent officers at Camp Thomas during the war was Captain William J. Fetterman, who arrived five days after Carrington opened the camp. He would later be killed and his troops massacred by Sioux Indians. Major William Axton Stokes, later a leading Philadelphia attorney, for a period commanded Camp Thomas.
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