by Macy, Beth
His lichen-covered headstone was unencumbered and dignified, with a Holy Bible sculpted into the top. At the bottom, in a half-cursive font, it said: Earth has no sorrow that heaven cannot heal.
It was a glorious May day, and Pat and I watched men in their waders fishing in the middle of the rippling Smith. We found our destination across from Pat’s house, on a ridge overlooking the town.
Harry Ferguson was about to get on his backhoe. He was a factory undertaker now, hired after the HAZMAT-suit wearers and demolition guys left Bassett Superior Lines. It was Harry’s job to put what was left of it underground.
The concrete and bricks had already been hauled here by truck—some forty-five thousand tons in all—so a landowner (and distant Bassett relative) could use it as fill for the ravine behind his house. The rough end of Superior Line’s rough end would be… to extend a wealthy man’s lawn.
“If you’d told people in Bassett ten years ago that I’d be up here today burying this plant, they’d have said you were a complete fool,” Harry said.
Grass seed would be sown once Harry got the ground leveled, as had already happened at the Superior site. Rob Spilman told me he wasn’t sure what the company would do with all the new expanses of lawn created by the factory demolitions. The company was already allowing town volunteers to hold a weekly farmers’ market in the old train depot, and the grass at Old Town would host the fall Bassett Heritage Festival. Perhaps the land behind Superior, with its proximity to the Smith, would tie into the county’s growing system of greenway trails and boat put-ins. “Maybe we can make this a quaint little cool destination someday and use it to tell our own little brand story,” Rob said, reminding me of one of the Harvest Foundation’s economic-development mantras:
You can’t move the river to China!
Two weeks later I found myself drifting toward the Smith. There had been a drenching rain the week before, and upriver, the Philpott Dam was in power-making mode. I floated on a side creek for about thirty seconds before my boat hit the Smith, and the gentle paddle I’d envisioned turned into white-water rafting instead. My guide was Jim Franklin, seventy-three, a float fisherman who’d run the Bassett particleboard plant for thirty-four years.
He named the abandoned factories that were still standing as we swiftly passed them. He pointed out where he’d personally hauled some of the concrete and brick from Bassett Superior and Old Town, placing the chunks just so on the riverbank to stave off erosion.
He canoed, I kayaked, and when the river wasn’t rushing and demanding our full concentration, he told me stories under a canopy of sycamores and scrub trees that teemed with wildlife. A Canada goose roamed the riverbanks with her trio of goslings. A great blue heron tracked our moves, swooping ahead every few minutes before landing on a new surveillance perch. The air temperature was sixty-four degrees, the water its usual forty-two, which is why people fish in the Smith but rarely swim, and why the trout find it ideal.
My full-immersion baptism in the Smith came right after we rounded the bend near the old Stanley Furniture factory and found a giant tree limb blocking most of our passage. Jim paddled expertly through a narrow channel on the left. I made the critical mistake of hesitating, which put me in exactly the worst position—parallel to the log—before the current slammed me against it.
The underwater plunge was as bone-chilling as it was abrupt. After being trapped for a moment between the tree and the kayak, I emerged coughing then clawed my way through the icy waters to Jim’s canoe. We rode out the rest of the rapids together—him inside the boat and me out, with my arm hooked over the bow. “You’re fine now,” Jim reassured me. “You’re fine.”
Before long, I wasn’t fine. My feet were numb, and fear of hypothermia sent me scrambling for the steep, muddy bank, which was cloaked in poison ivy.
Jim continued downstream, helpless to stop his canoe in the rushing river. “I’ll meet you up on the road!” he shouted, disappearing around a curve.
Scratched and shivering, I emerged from the woods about ten minutes later near a Stanleytown strip mall, behind a Family Dollar store. My Ray-Bans and ponytail holder were submerged in the river, along with my dignity, and when I appeared from the brush with matted hair, ripped pants, and muddy sandals, the woman taking out the store trash was startled. I looked mad, like some poor meth head who’d stumbled out of a newspaper mug shot. She shook her head.
“I’m not gonna ask,” she said unhelpfully, and hustled back inside.
Pat Ross picked me up at the CVS next door, bringing blankets, and before long we tracked down Jim, who had a small posse of old factory guys searching for me along the river. They’d lassoed the kayak before it floated too far downstream, and Jim even rescued my drenched reporter’s notebook from the riverbank, the scrawl inside still legible somehow.
The people of Bassett wanted their stories told.
The executives could drive through town with their blinders on—some of them commuting from across the state line—but the people of Bassett placed commemorative bricks on bookshelves and heaved chunks of factory foundations atop riverbanks. They built their own little monuments to a way of living that had vanished in a decade, one smokestack at a time.
Their world was not flat, and they wanted a witness to it. Someone to describe the creeping small-town carnage created by acronyms like NAFTA and WTO and an impotent TAA, all of it forged by faraway people who had never bothered to see the full result of what globalization had wrought.
Which is how a relative stranger ended up making three separate visits to search out Mary Hunter’s grave. It had taken several phone calls on Pat Ross’s part, but finally she found someone who knew exactly where to look: on the other side of the church, up a steep bank covered in weeds and fraught with chiggers and snakes.
Pat waited worriedly by the car while I climbed the bank and whistled to signal that I was okay. Five minutes into the climb, I spotted the rusty wire fence that surrounded Mary Hunter’s grave. It was the ornate, old-fashioned kind, with crinkly wires twined together in a scalloped edge along the top. One of the four sides was collapsed and tilted inward toward the stone, as if leaning on a crutch.
Recent rains had painted a dry crust of mud along the bottom of the gray marble stone, which was adorned with engraved daisies flanking her name near the top. The u in Hunter was thick with the labor of mud dauber wasps who were building a new home.
Beneath her name and date of death, tucked into an overgrown cemetery that was maybe a mile from Mr. J.D.’s pilfered mausoleum, the inscription on the tombstone read:
In memory of Mary Hunter
A faithful servant of
Mr. & Mrs. J.D. Bassett Sr.
This was American history, forgotten in these Blue Ridge foothills and buried amid another invasive Asian import: a sprawling bank of kudzu.
Several weeks earlier, I had asked for my own brick from the Bassett Superior burial ground. Harry Ferguson pulled one out of his stack and, with some degree of ceremony, chinked off the mortar before passing it to me carefully, the way one might hand over a sleeping baby or a rising loaf of bread. He knew and I knew that this piece of molded red clay didn’t begin to represent the world of furniture-making from the Smith River banks to the Sidoarjo mud.
But it was warm from the May sun, and it was solid, and, by and by, when Harry looked me in the eye, neither of us said a word. We just knew: There were people out there who would crawl on their bellies like a snake if it meant they could bring it all back.
In the first known picture of Bassett Furniture workers from 1902, W.M. Bassett (marked No. 17) is a wide-eyed eight-year-old perched (first row, far left) on a mishmash of boards. His company cofounder father, J.D. Bassett Sr., is No. 13, and his cofounder uncle, C.C. Bassett, is No. 11, with daughter Mabel Bassett (later Hooker) in his lap. (Bassett Historical Center)
Before they were rich: Mr. J.D. and his daughter, Anne, on the family farm in Bassett, circa 1910. (Bassett Historical Center)
After he talked the railway into building a new line through his property—so he could sell them the lumber for the ties—J.D. Bassett Sr. transformed his front yard into a furniture factory, using wood from his plentiful lands and cheap labor from people who lived in the Blue Ridge foothills and longed to join the cash economy, including former slaves turned sharecroppers, 1914. (Bassett Historical Center)
In a show of burgeoning wealth, the Bassetts began wintering in Florida during the flu epidemic of 1918. Cofounders J.D. and C.C. Bassett with their wives, Pocahontas and Roxie (who were sisters), in the Florida Keys, circa 1920s. (Bassett Historical Center)
J.D. and Pocahontas Bassett’s grand Victorian home, which matched the one occupied by his brother and company cofounder, C.C. Bassett. Pocahontas is perched on a trunk while two maids, presumably Mary Hunter and Gracie Wade (the live-ins documented in the 1930 U.S. Census), sit to the side on the lawn. (Bassett Historical Center)
“The Negroes made me,” J.D. Bassett Sr. said of his progressive—and shrewd—decision to hire black workers at the founding of his company, when his Southern competitors relegated them to sawmilling and sharecropping. Black workers earned less than their white counterparts, and until the 1970s they worked in segregated departments, often in the dirtiest jobs, as shown here in a 1920s photo from a Stanley Furniture finishing department, or “rub room.” (The George Holsclaw collection, courtesy of Coy Young)
John Bassett III was born during the epic flood of 1937, a storm so bad that the Red Cross pitched tents on the hills, and people sat atop railroad cars to inspect the rising waters as silt poured into their company-owned homes. Two of the four men pictured in downtown Bassett are clad in bib overalls, the typical factory worker’s uniform. On the far left is town jeweler C.M. Stafford. (Bassett Historical Center)
Future kissing cousins Pat Bassett and John Bassett III are at opposite ends of the front row in this 1945 photograph of most of the furniture-making clan gathered in Galax, Virginia. Front row from left: Pat Exum (now Bassett), Stan Chatham, Pocahontas Bassett, John D. Bassett Sr., John Bassett III. Relatives present represented Bassett Furniture, Lane Furniture, Vaughan Furniture, Vaughan-Bassett Furniture, and Stanley Furniture. Jane Bassett (now Spilman) is fourth from the left, second row, and Mary Elizabeth Morten is fifth. (Courtesy of John Bassett III, Pat Bassett, and Stan Chatham)
Bassett, Virginia, was a boomtown in the post–World War II years, chock-full of stores, barbershops, movie theaters, and smokestacks (Old Town at right), nearly all of it now gone. During the Depression, the company reduced wages and hours—rather than lay anyone off. (Bassett Historical Center)
From horseback to hosting the queen: Virginia governor and Bassett in-law Thomas B. Stanley hosted Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip during a 1957 visit to commemorate the 350th anniversary of the Jamestown settlement. Photographed from left: Queen Elizabeth; Stanley grandson Hugh Chatham Jr.; Governor Stanley; grandsons Stan, Crockett, and Rob Chatham; Anne Pocahontas Bassett Stanley (in fur); and Prince Philip. (The Anne Stanley Chatham collection of the Bassett Historical Center, courtesy of Stan Chatham)
J.D. Bassett with his longtime chauffeur, Pete Wade, and fish caught near the family compound in Hobe Sound, Florida. When his sons teased him for never learning to drive, Mr. J.D. snapped: “I pay Pete 25 cents an hour so I can sit in the passenger seat and think about how to make more money.” Pete was married to family maid Gracie Wade—the only one who raised her voice when John Bassett III left Bassett, the company and the town—following a family feud in 1982. (The Anne Stanley Chatham collection of the Bassett Historical Center, courtesy of Stan Chatham)
Bassett Furniture CEO W.M. Bassett in his namesake factory, which, many decades later, became the subject of another family-furniture tug-of-war. “W.M. Bassett was the best factory man of all. He had absolutely no personal ego,” a salesman recalled. (Courtesy of Mary Elizabeth Bassett Morten)
Early white workers lived near the Smith River banks, and teamed up in groups of four or five to build boats together they could paddle across the Smith. Eventually, they walked to work on swinging bridges erected by the company. (Courtesy of Steve Eggleston, © 1969)
Pat and John Bassett were nationally recognized skeet-shooting champions in the early 1970s. The couple threw grand parties in their riverside home, and some workers said the pair reminded them of a Southern John F. and Jackie Kennedy. (Courtesy of Pat and John Bassett)
Wyatt Bassett, who would emerge as a key figure in his father’s antidumping petition against China, went grouse-hunting with his father, John Bassett III, in the late 1970s. “He didn’t even like grouse-hunting,” his mother said. “He just always wanted to please his dad.” (Courtesy of Pat Bassett)
Longtime Bassett Furniture CEO Bob Spilman was nicknamed S.O.B.—the joke was, it stood for Sweet Ole Bob—by his wife, Jane Bassett Spilman. He was the main reason John Bassett III left his namesake town for Galax, Virginia, and has long considered himself the family’s black sheep. (Photograph by Taylor Dabney, courtesy of Virginia Business magazine)
Longtime family maid Gracie Wade was the only one to openly object when John Bassett III left Bassett to work for his wife’s family’s furniture company in Galax after butting heads with his brother-in-law and boss, Bob Spilman, for decades. “It ain’t right,” she said, as she helped serve the family’s Christmas dinner, which she continued, by tradition, well into her nineties. (Courtesy of Pat Ross)
Larry Moh, a Chinese native working in Taiwan, was among the first of the Asian furniture makers to capitalize on the new importing landscape. (Wharton Magazine)
John Bassett III, circa 2013. (Photograph by David Hungate)
The Vaughan-Bassett team that took on China, from left: J. Doug Bassett IV, John D. Bassett III, Taiwanese translator and consultant Rose Maner, company comptroller Doug Brannock, Wyatt Bassett, and vice president Sheila Key. (Photograph by David Hungate)
The nephew of John Bassett III and the son of Bob and Jane Spilman, Rob Spilman is now the CEO of Bassett Furniture Industries. J. Edwin Bassett (aka Mr. Ed) is pictured on the wall of the corporate offices, aka the Taj Mahal. (Photograph by Jared Soares)
Aftermath: A Trade Adjustment Assistance worker helps displaced Henry County worker Frances Kissee fill out her paperwork. Kissee lost six jobs in eighteen years to closures, the most recent in 2012 when the Martinsville call center she was working for moved operations to the Philippines. (Photograph by Jared Soares)
Aftermath: Once regal, C.C. Bassett’s house on the hill has fallen into disrepair, along with most of the town. “It’s a money pit,” said current owner Carolyn Brown, who has trouble heating it in winter. Mr. Ed Bassett lived in the same home during the company’s heyday, as did his wife, Ruby, who never refused to give food or money when her biracial brother-in-law appeared at her back door. (Photograph by Beth Macy)
Junior Thomas worked at Bassett Mirror Company, while his wife, Mary, worked at Bassett-Walker Knitting and as a housekeeper and nanny. Until Mary’s death in November 2013, they lived together in a trailer in the community where most of the earliest black furniture workers lived, alternately named Chigger Ridge, Snot Hollow, Carver Lane, and Carson Road. “We made ’em what they had,” Junior Thomas said. “We made ’em rich.” (Photograph by Beth Macy)
Aftermath: Wanda Perdue lost her job when Stanley Furniture closed its Stanleytown plant in 2010, then struggled for years to find re-employment, even after she’d gotten her associate’s degree. She asked the author to go to Asia to interview her replacement workers and explain “why we can’t do that here no more.” (Photograph by Kyle Green, courtesy of the Roanoke Times)
Aftermath: With nearly half of the region’s workforce wiped out by globalization, the lines at the Community Storehouse food bank in Henry County form hours before the doors open. A conveyor belt from an abandoned textile plant is used to move the food along in boxes. (Photograph by Jared Soares)
Aftermath: “If you’d have told people in Bassett ten ye
ars ago that I’d be up here burying these plants today, they’d have said you were a complete fool,” said Harry Ferguson, hired to bury the detritus remaining from a fire that destroyed Bassett Superior Lines in 2012. Once the most profitable furniture factory in the world, Bassett Superior Lines closed in 2007. It specialized in “pretty vanilla stuff the consumer no longer wanted,” Bassett CEO Rob Spilman said, and was cavernously designed to furnish the GIs when they came home from World War II—not cheaply made hand-carved furniture from Asia. (Photograph by Beth Macy)
Acknowledgments
This book began with a set of images that were found, nurtured, and documented by photographer Jared Soares, who not only noticed what most everyone else simply drove by but actually stopped and got to know some of the five million people who had lost their jobs to globalization. The stories I wrote to accompany Jared’s photographs were originally developed under the direction of my Roanoke Times editors Carole Tarrant and Brian Kelley, with support from managing editor Michael Stowe and publisher Debbie Meade. Factory Man grew directly out of that series.