Qualla: Henry County, Virginia

Henry County, Virginia: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chamblis, CC BY-SA 4.0. Patrick Henry - the man who shouted give me liberty or give me death in 1775, the first governor of Virginia, the orator without whom American history textbooks would be much shorter - spent five years living on a 10,000-acre plantation on Leatherwood Creek in southern Virginia. The county that surrounded his land took his name in 1777, although by a quirk of legislative drafting that the founders apparently did not notice, the official statute called the new county simply Henry. The Patrick part never made it into law. The county has held that name through 250 years of change: the cultivation of tobacco that wore out the eastern soils and drove farmers west, the textile boom that made the small city in its middle one of the wealthiest per capita in America, the moonshine trade that thrived in the Blue Ridge hollows, the NASCAR speedway that opened at Ridgeway in 1947 and is still the shortest oval in the Cup Series. Henry County is about 51,000 people on 384 square miles of rolling Piedmont hills, all of it wrapped around an independent city, Martinsville, that the county no longer governs but cannot quite separate from.

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Image: Chamblis | CC BY-SA 4.0

Henry County, Virginia: The Statute That Forgot Patrick

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bigbuisness, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Virginia General Assembly passed the bill creating the county in October 1776. The new entity took effect on January 1, 1777, the day the county legally came into being. Read the statute - The Statutes at Large, William Waller Hening, Volume 9, pages 241 to 242 - and you find...

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Image: Bigbuisness | CC BY-SA 3.0

Henry County, Virginia: Patrick Henry at Leatherwood

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MarmadukePercy, CC BY-SA 3.0. Between his third and fourth gubernatorial terms, around 1779 to 1784, Patrick Henry lived at his 10,000-acre Leatherwood Plantation on the creek of that name. He served in the Virginia House of Delegates from Henry County while he lived here. The plantation's enslaved laborers g...

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Image: MarmadukePercy | CC BY-SA 3.0

Henry County, Virginia: Joseph Martin and Scuffle Hill

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MarmadukePercy, CC BY-SA 3.0. The city of Martinsville is named for Joseph Martin, a Revolutionary War general, Native American agent, and frontier explorer who built his plantation Scuffle Hill on the Smith River near the present-day southern city line. Martin and Patrick Henry were friends; the two often vi...

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Image: MarmadukePercy | CC BY-SA 3.0

Henry County, Virginia: The Paperclip Oval at Ridgeway

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gmon156, CC BY-SA 3.0. Henry Clay Earles, a Virginia businessman who had taken a liking to the stock car races outside Salisbury, North Carolina, in the 1940s, bought 30 acres of red clay at Ridgeway and built an oval racetrack. The first race ran September 7, 1947. Red Byron won in front of 6,013 payi...

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Image: Gmon156 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Henry County, Virginia: The County and the City

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Donnie Nunley, CC BY 3.0. Virginia is unusual in American government because its cities are independent of their counties: a Virginia city is, in jurisdictional terms, a separate political entity. Martinsville became an independent city in 1928, removing itself from Henry County government. The arrangemen...

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Image: Donnie Nunley | CC BY 3.0