Henry County Courthouse taken about 1905. Note changes. A center outside staircase has replaced the two side staircases. In 1901, the Confederate monument was dedicated by the Mildred Lee Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy in the presence of 8000 persons. ... The cannons, weighing 16,000 pounds each, were also given by the Mildred Lee Chapter. Horses were unable to drag the cannons up the hill from the railroad station to the courthouse because the road was muddy from rain. D.E. Marshall, a local contractor, got elephants from a circus that was in town to pull them into place. This description is taken from the book entitled Martinsville & Henry County Historic Views published in 1976 by the Martinsville-Henry County Woman's Club. Miss Hilda Marshall, a 1950s era schoolteacher in the Martinsville city schools, described to her students the securing of those elephants as the work of her father.
Could the elephant story be only heresay ... a legend? Recently the Mildred Lee Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy loaned the staff at Bassett Historical Center old scrapbooks, photographs, information that had been stored at the old Henry County Courthouse for years. This information contained papers voicing the remembrances of Mrs. Kathleen Teague Carter who remembered vividly that there were no elephants involved; she remembered because she watched mules pulling the cannons while swinging on the gate in her front yard. It took almost a month for the mules to pull these two cannons to the old courthouse as it kept raining, and the cannons would get bogged down in the mud. This kept happening until the mud dried. Then, the mules would try again! These cannons figured in the Revolutionary War, were used for defense for the South in the Civil War, and were used at Fort McHenry, Maryland prior to being shipped to Martinsville.
The train station Mrs. Teague mentioned was the Norfolk and Western Broad Street Station and not the Danville and Western Station behind the Henry County Courthouse on Franklin Street.
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