Perley A. Thomas

Perley Albert Thomas (1874 to 1958) was a Canadian-born American industrialist and entrepreneur. Trained as a millsmith in woodworking, he was born on a farm outside Chatham, Ontario, and moved to the United States in 1901, settling in Detroit before working for a streetcar manufacturer in Cleveland. He studied technical drawing and structural engineering at night and, as streetcar builders moved from wood to steel, took a post as chief engineer at the Southern Car Company in High Point, North Carolina, in 1910. After that company folded in 1916 he renovated streetcars for a Charlotte utility and the following year organized Perley A. Thomas Car Works, famous for its streetcars, including the Desire line cars of New Orleans. He saw the shift from streetcars to buses and led his company into bus manufacturing in 1936. The firm was later reorganized as Thomas Built Buses, one of the three principal builders of large school buses in the United States by the end of the twentieth century. He was inducted into the North Carolina Transportation Hall of Fame in 2004 and the North American Railway Hall of Fame in 2010.