Oct. 24
100 Years ago – 1924
At a special meeting of Martinsville Town Council, Council made an agreement for securing additional electric power for the town. The Lights and Power committee had met with Mr. John Saunders, and it was agreed that as soon as the Saunders water power is developed, that the Town would take 550 KW hours for 10 hours each day at the price of 2 cents per KW hour, under a 15-year contract. In the matter of current for the Hooker-Bassett Furniture Co., the committee recommended that if the company furnished all equipment and material for making the installation, the Town would install it, and only charge them a standby charge such as is usually charged by power companies. That plan was approved.
In earlier years, the Henry Bulletin had many advertisements for corsets, that classic type with whalebone stays. Those advertisements were fewer and fewer in number by 1923, and had all but disappeared by 1924 – until – this ad for a new type of body-shaper, offered by C.W. Holt: “Be thinner by evening. Gossard Rubber Reducing Garments - effective at once. As soon as you adjust these garments you’ll look thinner and feel thinner. In a day’s time you will have actually grown thinner. Your dresses fit perfectly over them, they’re comfortable, and there’s no outward evidence of what you’re wearing. They’re covered on the outside with a lovely pink silk tricot, like a fine corset; on the inside with soft cotton tricot to absorb the moister and keep the corset from riding up.”
75 years ago – 1949
Hackler-Seymour Metal Works at 26 Bridge St., Phone 4153, sold refrigerators, washers, dryers, dishwashers, gas and electric ranges, water heaters, space heaters and floor heaters, for just a quarter a day.
1960
A representative from Norfolk & Western Railway told the Henry County Board of Supervisors that the railway intended to apply to the corporation commission of North Carolina and Virginia to uphold the railway’s request to stop passenger and express service to Martinsville. Train No. 11 departed the Martinsville station at 1:17 each day for Winston-Salem and Train No. 12 left Martinsville at 4:43 each day for Roanoke. The representative said the railway was losing $139 on the Martinsville passenger service each day.
50 years ago – 1974
Jack Franklin Billings, 37, of Tower Road, Bassett, was dead on arrival at Memorial Hospital after an accident at a furniture factory. He was working at a shaping machine when a blade ejected from the machine and struck him in the head. His widow was Mary McPeak Billings.
25 years ago – 1999
John M. Frank, 46, left as chairman of the board of Tultex Corp. and into the position of Internet development director for Tultex. He worked out of the Customer Service Center off Va. 174. There would not be any other chairman of the board named, so that the company’s president, who was O. Randolph Rollins, would preside over the board. The company was founded by Franck’s father in an industry established locally by his grandfather.
Dr. Elizabeth Moore of the Virginia Museum of Natural History taught a non-credit class in local archaeology for four Mondays at Patrick Henry Community College. The focus was identifying artifacts and sites of Native American and European artifacts.
— Information from museum records and the Henry Bulletin and the Martinsville Bulletin.