Joseph Thompson (doctor)

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Dr. Joseph Thompson

Dr. Joseph Thompson (September 29, 1797–August 21, 1885) was an early settler of Atlanta, Georgia, hotelier and real-estate investor.

Born to a Pennsylvania-bred family in Spartanburg County, South Carolina where he practiced medicine as a youth. He moved to Georgia and moved the new town of Decatur where he married Mary Ann Tomlinson Young in 1827. He ran a stage coach between the capitol, Milledgeville, and Tuscumbia, Alabama by way of Decatur where he kept an inn. He was an important man in town, friend of Judge William Ezzard and John Glen (both future mayors of Atlanta) and he was entrusted by the citizenry to make sure that the terminus of the Western & Atlantic Railroad not be their little town. As Terminus (and later Marthasville and still later Atlanta) grew, the Georgia Railroad built a brick hotel building for railroad workers and asked Dr. Thompson to run it.

He and his family arrived in Atlanta nearly at the beginning in 1845 where he ran the Atlanta Hotel up to its destruction after the Battle of Atlanta. This was the largest and best hotel in town at the time and he was known as a genial host. His witticisms there were often quoted in the Editor's Drawer feature of Harper's Magazine. He had many residents there, such as Atlanta's first mayor Moses Formwalt (whose estate Thompson later administered) and Alexander Stephens (this was the hotel where he was stabbed in 1848 by Judge Francis Cone).

Their oldest child, Mary Jane married Richard Peters in 1848. Mrs. Thompson died at their Atlanta home in 1849 and he remarried in 1851, but she lived only three years when he married again in 1858 and she was with him until her death in 1878.

He owned many important parcels of land in the young city, including the future location of the SunTrust Bank building at Five Points. In 1850, he was on the committee which brought the town its first agricultural fair, the Fifth Annual Fair of the Southern Central Agricultural Association, which was held at newly purchased land at the end of Fair St. (now Memorial Dr).

After the war he sold $70,000 worth of real eastate including the site of his hotel where the Kimball House was later built. In 1867, when General Pope of the Third Military District, ordered election committees to over-see the changes in voter status, he named Dr. Thompson to head the committee for Atlanta.

At the time of his death in 1885, he was president of the Medical College in Atlanta and still resided on Pryor Street.