Sept. 15 through the years
100 Years ago – 1925
The Business and Professional Women’s Club met in the Henry Hotel with a good turnout. Members welcomed back President Laura Penn who had been at the University of Virginia for 2 months.
75 years ago – 1950
The Selective Service of Henry County sent 98 men to the Roanoke draft center for physicals, to see who would be fit to send to the Korean War. Forty-eight men from Martinsville had been sent just the day before.
City Council discussed the possibility of training and hiring several women to be cross guards at the schools. It had been done successfully in other cities, a City official had said. They would get uniforms and a low monthly salary. Their employment would release the three city policemen presently doing that work for other types of patrol service.
50 years ago – 1975
The Consolidated District Home in Chatham was a 2-story wood and brick building with columned porches and porticos on the second floor. It had a long driveway lined by oak trees and was on 3 acres. The home was licensed to house 70 people but at the time had 42 – 19 men and 23 women ranging in age from early 50s to 94. The house had 41 bedrooms, two television rooms, two dining rooms, eight bathrooms, a superintendent’s apartment and a chapel. The home replaced the former poor houses in the counties of Henry, Patrick, Amherst, Campbell and Pittsylvania which were closed in 1929 by order of the State Department of Welfare Institutions for unsatisfactory environmental conditions.
Congress sent to President Ford a bill that would raise price supports for flue-cured tobacco from 93.2 cents a pound to 99.9 cents, and for burley tobacco from 96.1 cents a pound to $1.06. The bill was estimated to cost $48 million a year in taxes and might raise the price of a pack of cigarettes by a penny over the next 2 years. Price supports were guaranteed minimum prices set by the federal government to protect the farmer from wide fluctuations in market prices. When tobacco farmers accepted government prices, they sold their crops to the Flue-Cured Stabilization Service, which later sold the tobacco to companies and returned any profit from those sales to the farmers.
25 years ago - 2000
State Sen. Roscoe Reynolds spoke to Martinsville High School students in Denise Morrison’s advanced placement government class. His visit coincided with the first nationwide America’s Legislators Back to School Day, sponsored by the National Conference of State Legislatures. He also spoke to students at Magna Vista High School.
— Information from museum records and the Henry Bulletin and the Martinsville Bulletin.