Did you know that a Monroe County school teacher devised improvements on a washing machine and on a water wheel used in water-powered mills and also secured a patent for coupling railroad cars?

William David Thurmond, whose family is identified with the Thurmond Mill in Monroe County, graduated from Emory College. [A number of his seventeen surviving siblings were college educated.] His invention in 1890 of an improved railroad car coupling carried him away from Monroe County for a number of years. After his company, the Thurmond Car Coupling Company, folded, he returned to Monroe County and resumed his work in the classroom. He died shortly after his eightieth birthday in an accident at the family’s mill on the Tobesofkee as he was attempting to oil its machinery.