Nov. 7

100 Years ago – 1924

The County Treasurer, D.S. Davis, announced his schedule for being in various communities to receive taxes. The schedule listed the dates and times he would be at each community, but did not say which building he’d be in, or where to find him. Of course somehow people would have known. The list does let us know what some main communities were 100 years ago; one or two you may never have heard of, one or two nothing now but the names of churches that remain there: Irisburg, Loneoak, Axton, Mountain Valley, Leatherwood, Figsboro, Philpott, Bassett, Sanville, Spencer, Smith’s Store, Moore’s Mill, Horsepasture, Ridgeway, Fieldale, Martinsville.

75 years ago – 1949

Work on the new road from Martinsville to Stuart began. A prison camp was set up on Route 58 as the base for construction. The first part to be done would be to clear a section of the surveyed route from Route 220 south of Martinsville towards Horsepasture. Convict labor would do the job. Richard Worthington was the resident engineer. Sgt. R.R. O’Meara of the State Department of Corrections reported that he had nearly finished setting up the new convict camp near Grogan’s store on Route 58. The camp had 63 prisoners, all black, who already had erected 14 buildings there and were starting on the office for the engineer in charge of construction. They also were getting ready to put up the wire fence around it. Sgt. O’Meara also had carried a drove of hogs and a large flock of chickens to the prison camp as well as a large supply of canned food prepared the year before by prison labor at West Point.

1960

The Stroller column of the Martinsville Bulletin included this: “Well, here it is the day before election. And the telephone rang and a man, who said he lived in Fieldale, posed this question: ‘How does a man know whether he’s a Democrat or Republican?’ Well …

25 years ago - 1999

St. Joseph Catholic Church held a homecoming service for accident victim Corey Mayo, 13. He was hit by a car on the first day of school, Aug. 25, as he was walking to the bus stop. He spent months in hospitals and rehabilitation centers and finally was returning home, though he had to spend much of his time in a wheelchair.

Two workers died in an explosion that sparked fires in two mountains of wood shavings at the International Paper plant in Stuart, Gene F. Gobble, 38, of High Point, and Williams Walls, 43, of Greensboro.

— Information from museum records and the Henry Bulletin and the Martinsville Bulletin.

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