Qualla: Martinsville, Virginia

Martinsville, Virginia: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Smash the Iron Cage, CC BY-SA 4.0. In the 1980s, Martinsville quietly claimed something extraordinary: more millionaires per capita than any city in America. The wealth came from sweatshirts. From nylon, knit textiles, and the chair-and-bedroom-set furniture business. From the DuPont plant that opened in 1941 to make nylon filament for parachutes and ended up making the fabric for half a generation's American hoodies. Then the 1990s came, and the trade treaties came, and the factories went. Thousands of jobs moved offshore. The Sweatshirt Capital of the World became something nobody had bothered to coin a phrase for: a small Virginia city - 13,485 people in the 2020 census - that had once been very rich, and now wasn't. Martinsville today is the kind of place where Berkshire Hathaway owns the daily newspaper, where the NASCAR speedway just outside town still draws sellout crowds twice a year, and where a 2019 city council voted unanimously to give up city status entirely - then reversed itself in 2023 and chose to stay.

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Image: Smash the Iron Cage | CC BY-SA 4.0

Martinsville, Virginia: Joseph Martin's Plantation

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rembrandt Peale, Public domain. The city is named for Joseph Martin, a Revolutionary War general, Native American agent, and frontier explorer born in Albemarle County. Martin built his Scuffle Hill plantation on the Smith River near the present-day southern city limits and lived there until his death in 1808. ...

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Image: Rembrandt Peale | Public domain

Martinsville, Virginia: Plug Tobacco, Then Furniture, Then DuPont

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mike Kalasnik from Fort Mill, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0. For decades after the Civil War, Martinsville's main business was the manufacture of plug chewing tobacco. The Henry County area became known as the Plug Tobacco Capital of the World. Local families - the Spencers, the Gravelys, the Ruckers, the Wittens, the Lesters, the Browns -...

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Image: Mike Kalasnik from Fort Mill, USA | CC BY-SA 2.0

Martinsville, Virginia: The Martinsville Seven

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gregory Koch, CC BY-SA 4.0. In January 1949, seven African American men were arrested in Martinsville and charged with the rape of a white woman. All seven were convicted by all-white juries in trials that took place under enormous pressure for swift conviction. All seven were executed in Virginia's electri...

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Image: Gregory Koch | CC BY-SA 4.0

Martinsville, Virginia: Whitney Shumate and the Mill Town Houses

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit DwayneP at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. Through the mid-twentieth century, business leader Whitney Shumate organized a private effort to clear and rebuild a section of Martinsville called Mill Town - substandard rental housing originally built for nineteenth-century cotton mill workers. Shumate and his associates bough...

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Image: DwayneP at English Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Martinsville, Virginia: The City That Almost Stopped Being One

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MarmadukePercy, CC BY-SA 3.0. Virginia's independent cities are unusual in American government: they are entirely separate from the surrounding county. Martinsville became independent in 1928, taking itself out of Henry County's jurisdiction. By the late 2010s the math of running a small independent city had ...

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Image: MarmadukePercy | CC BY-SA 3.0