Jan. 16 through the years

1924: On Jan. 16, 1924, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union held a celebration of the fourth anniversary of the Eighteenth Amendment to the constitution – Prohibition – at the Presbyterian Church. Speakers included Rev. C.H. Phipps, and Rev. W.B. Jett of the Methodist church. The slogan of the W.C.T.U. became “a saloonless America by 1920.” Before Prohibition, Jett said in his talk, 24 states had passed prohibition acts, and in Virginia a vote of 40,000 majority had been polled for prohibition. The National Prohibition law went into effect on Jan. 16, 1920.

1949: Two-year-old Billy Harris received a gunshot wound in the abdomen. He was treated at Martinsville General Hospital, where he was said to be in fair condition. He was shot with a .22-calibre rifle while he and his brother were waiting in a car outside the hospital while his father and an aunt visited their mother inside the hospital. In another car, two 4-year-old boys were waiting as well. One of them found a rifle that his father had left in the back of the rear seat.

1974: A new $660,000 vocational shop facility was built at Martinsville High School and got its final inspection by W.K. Putney, school board chair; Conrad Knight, architect; and Chester Lane, director of industrial arts and vocational education.

1999: The Mary Anna Jackson Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy was still active. Members then included Louise Noble, Margaret DeHart, Susan Critz, Nancy Doyle, Mary Virginia Kyle, Jessie Martin, Carolyn Tush and Jean Gray.

2024: A metal fraternity dog tag, found in the waters of the Roanoke River in North Carolina, has been connected to a burglary that occurred in Martinsville almost 73 years ago, the Martinsville Bulletin reported. That dog tag belonged to Kent Mathewson, Martinsville’s first city manager. The City voted to change to a city manager type of government in the last week of January 1949 (which you’ll read about in next week’s “Looking Back” columns, and Mathewson was hired for that role within the week. The house robbery this article references happened just two years later.