Jan. 12 through time, 2025
1925
James Harris, 12, drowned in the Smith River. He had been excused from school because he said he was sick, but instead went to meet one of his friends at a designated point. He went there in a crude paddle boat, but the water was swirling so wildly that he could not control it. He jumped to some branches but could not hold onto them.
1950
The quota for the Henry County March of Dimes was $10,000, to help victims of polio. Committee members were E.S. Bailey, Seymour Rosenberg, Barbara Zimmerman, Danny Greene, A.L. Philpott, Franky Raymond Vass, C.D. Looney, J.B. Jones Jr., Ralph Tavenner, Harrison Trent, Frank Brown, J.F. Hollifield, Mrs. Claude E. Taylor Jr., Mrs. J.X. Labovsky, W.W. Hensley, George Shropshire, Erwin and Evelyn Russ, Kenneth Hearn, Joe Schreibfeder, Jim Young, Maynard Shelton, Shelton Scales, Byron Hensley, C. McFarland, Clyde Richardson, Joe Labovsky and Taylor Finney. Each oversaw a category such as furniture industries, textile industries, retail merchants, theaters and sporting events, etc.
1961
The Fairfield Hunt Club was near Axton, and E.A. Sale was the manager and owner. He found in a trap an unusual owl which Royster Lyles, a member of the Ornithologist Society of Virgnia, identified as a Great Horned Owl, uncommon in this area.
1975
The Drunken Springs community was just a few miles east of Martinsville. The area is in sharp S-curve east of the city limits, on the Martinsville side of Mountain View Drive on U.S. 57 East. A man passing along the road decided to drink water from the spring there, but since he was drunk, he fell in and drowned. Another theory on the name is that years ago when men came to the county seat on court day they used to swap horses. They’d get drunk and often on their return trip would tie their horses by the roadside and drink out of the spring. By the time they’d sober up, some of them didn’t recognize their “new” horses and felt they had been cheated. Another place with an interesting name was No Head Bottom, the level hollow on Chatham Heights Road near the old VFW Club. Someone supposedly saw a headless man riding a horse there long ago.
2000
The Patrick County Industrial Development Authority (IDA) would help the Patrick Community Hospital get out of bankruptcy, but only under one condition – that the hospital’s board of directors resign. If they would, then the County would provide the IDA with $1.75 million to negotiate with BB&T to pay off the hospital’s loan to the bank. Seven of the 10 directors said right off that they’d resign in order to get that deal for the hospital.
— Information from museum records and the Henry Bulletin and the Martinsville Bulletin.