July 3

By Holly Kozelsky and Pat Pion

100 Years ago – 1924

A Richmond man was arrested in Roanoke and brought to Martinsville by Deputy Sheriff Turner on the charge of jumping his board bill at Mountain View Hotel, conducted by Mrs. J.R. Winn. He also was charged with grand larceny in the misappropriation of funds amounting to $104 from his employers, Wilson Wickham and Thornton.

75 years ago – 1949

The Thomas Jefferson Hotel was under the oversight of a new manager, Arch J. Oliver, who had come from Washington D.C. Oliver said that the hotel’s coffee shop would be reopened, and the redecoration of the dining room would take several weeks. Several of the 28 rooms had been repapered over the prior year, and some received new furniture. Also in the hotel building were the J.C. Penney store, Al’s Music Shop and Capital Store. The basement was home to the offices of government employees of the Philpott reservoir project.

1960

Lester Lumber Company announced a major expansion. Lester had bought a hardwood flooring plant in Kentucky and was planning to move its operations to Martinsville. In July 1960 the company had 206 workers, and the addition of the flooring plant would add 150 more. Lester had purchased the business, assets, equipment and patent rights on all hardwood flooring of the W.M. Ritter Lumber Co. in Winchester, Ky. G.T. Lester Jr. was the president and treasurer of the Martinsville company. The new 15,000-square-foot building would be built on company property on Liberty Street, just south of the hardwood flooring mill that already was there. It would be 50 feet wide and 300 feet long. Construction already had started on a new machine and shop building and a large addition to the kiln room. The overall building program would provide 50,000 additional square feet of floor space at a cost of half a million dollars.

50 years ago – 1974

Tensions were high between doctors and rescue squad workers in the summer of 1974, following the making public of a letter written by Dr.  C.D. Hardison, who practiced out of Memorial Hospital, to rescue squads. His letter, which was made public though he had said it was intended only for rescue squads, accused area rescue squad volunteers of thrill-seeking and incompetence. A meeting was held at Bassett Rescue Squad to address the letter. At the meeting, rescue squad volunteers said, among other things: Thrill-seeking members are quickly weeded out; more people nationwide die in emergency rooms waiting for treatment than in ambulances; they sometimes call ahead to the hospital to give information about the patient only to find, once they arrive, that no one had passed that information on to the doctors and nurses; they often have to hang around the hospital to get their equipment back; and they are too often called upon to provide non-emergency taxi service to the hospital.   

25 years ago - 1999

The annual Henry July 4th Parade was held, and Aaron L. Clark of Martinsville participated in the parade as Ziggy the Clown.

— Information from museum records and the Henry Bulletin and the Martinsville Bulletin accessed on microfilm at the Martinsville Branch Library.