August 28
100 Years ago – 1924
The Roanoke Booster Club visited Martinsville at the D&W train station from noon to 2:40 p.m. as part of its tour to promote better goodwill and understanding among people of this section. The group of 150 traveled on a special train of Pullmans, accompanied by a brass band and with one car full of souvenirs. They gave out some souvenirs of Roanoke and took moving pictures of the Martinsville area.
75 years ago – 1949
The clearing of land near the Philpott Dam site has been nearly finished. Piles of rock and sand were to be carried to the mixing plant through a large pipe the contractors call a tunnel. The tunnel-pipe would be underneath five large piles of crushed stone called “aggregate.” Four of those piles would be crushed into various sizes, and the fifth would be pulverized to sand. At the bottom of the piles would be sliding doors through which the material would pour into the conveyor through openings in the pipe. Two shifts would be employed to make concrete. The rock would be excavated from the Fort Trial Quarry by Lambert Brothers of Knoxville, Tenn.
1960
The sermon at First Methodist Church on Church Street was “Conscience: The Thinking Man’s Filter.”
Martinsville and Henry County volunteers worked two telecast marathon programs to raise emergency funds for the treatment of polio victims. The first ran from 11:15 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 27, to 3 a.m. Sunday, Aug. 28, and the next was the same hours Sept. 3-4, made over Channel 10, WSLS in Roanoke. The Roanoke headquarters were set up in the National Guard armory there. In Martinsville, four telephone lines were set up in the home of Mrs. Drury Doss, local chair of the emergency fund. Members of the MHC Life Saving Crew drove around to pick up donations. The funds were going to help pay off the $28,000 in hospital bills incurred by local polio victims.
50 years ago – 1974
The list of nicknames of men in their 30s and 40s in Fieldale continued … David “Alf” Plaster, J.B. “Cracker” Spencer, Bobby “Whitehead” Johnson, Frank “Cowsack” Harris, George Frederick “Shaky” or “Archibald” Merriman, Wayne “Shine” Eanes, Jerry “Igloo” Slaughter, Jerry “Beef” Merriman, Jewell “Rudy” Earles and Otis “Fuzzy” Jackson. These were listed in the Bulletin’s Stroller column, sent in by Gladys Plaster of Fieldale.
25 years ago - 1999
The County of Henry was its third year into a program of cleaning up neighborhoods by removing junked cars, by paying owners $50 per junked cars to remove them. Four pairs of deputies and auto salvage dealers removed made arrangements to remove more than 90 cars, but there still were another 20 that they decided to pick up later in the fall.
— Information from museum records and the Henry Bulletin and the Martinsville Bulletin.