Organizers of Saturday's 20th annual Bassett Heritage Festival had the bands hired and the details plotted out: For the first time, the festival would be held on land where the first Bassett Furniture Inds. factory once stood, back when it was this small unincorporated town's reason for being.

Old-timers still call that 1902 plant "Old Town," even though it closed in 1989, the first Bassett factory to fall as imports from Asia decimated Southern furniture- and textile-making, wiping out almost half of the jobs in Martinsville and Henry County alone.

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Source: The Roanoke Times