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8 Murder Trial in Franklin County Carter Lee, the grandnephew of Robert E. Lee, was up there, facing a possible prison term, and the South was shocked. . . . He came clear. Of all the men indicted, he and two unimportant deputy sheriffs were the only ones who did come clear. —Sherwood Anderson, “City Gangs Enslave Moonshine Mountaineers” standing guard outside the Franklin County courthouse is a tall statue of a Confederate soldier gazing northward, rifle at the ready. The statue commemorates the Franklin County men who fought for the Army of Northern Virginia under Gen. Robert E. Lee’s command. Jubal Early, a wealthy planter and slaveholder from the Piedmont section of Franklin County, served as one of Lee’s generals. Over three hundred men from the county died serving under those generals; countless others returned wounded and maimed. Though several days’ march from the nearest Virginia battlefield , Franklin County suffered not only these direct losses from combat but also paid a massive price in economic setbacks that lasted for decades—well beyond the 1930s when economic depression worsened the region’s plight. After the war, as Franklin County’s African American population struggled to emerge from slavery’s shadows, which native son Booker T. Washington well described, the white Confederate infantrymen represented by the statue, almost all of them yeoman farmers, returned to dig their way out of an impoverished agriculture as well. They exchanged swords for plowshares but lived poorer than they had before the war started. Some in Franklin County, both poor blacks and whites, stayed in hock through the farm tenant system known as sharecropping for decades to come. With no sales outlets for their farm products, small landowners faired little better. Even as the North built massive rail systems and new manufacturing plants while fighting the war, the South lost what industry it had, including most of its agriculture, and the whole region fell into poverty. The smallest farmers fared worst. Though the granite Confederate sentry looks well appointed and ready for action, the live soldiers heading back to their small farms or to sharecropping in 1865 were indigent and beaten down. Many brought back a horse or murder trial in franklin county 209 a secreted rifle to show for their service, but they carried no cash, and they would see little or no money coming their way from farming for a long time to come. Neither would their children. The best most of them could hope for was to feed their families. Many sharecroppers could not even say that. By 1915, fifty years following the war, Rocky Mount had started to industrialize some. A furniture manufacturing plant called Bald Knob started buying a few board feet of local lumber, including oak and red cedar, and the sawmills and the timber cutters in Endicott and other mountain locales sold some logs as the plant hired some sixty-five workers. A few men found jobs at the new Angles Silk Mill in Rocky Mount as well. But this was hardly a boom, and even the few jobs that emerged then were dwindling by 1930 as a national decline spread to local areas. In the first decades of the twentieth century, farmers in the most arable parts of the county, where fields were large enough to produce for off-farm sales and credit was available, began to specialize. Some dairies in the rolling hills section of the county began building their herds for increased milk sales in Roanoke and Winston-Salem, and a few others planted acres in commercial apple and peach orchards. The arrival of the N & W Railroad spur from Roanoke to Rocky Mount in 1890 encouraged sales of both milk and produce outside the county, and slowly agricultural income began to build. Henry Wallace’s federal farm relief provided tobacco allotments beginning in 1934, again mostly in the eastern part of the county, and the warehouses started to fill with Franklin tobacco after record low prices in 1932. Tobacco sellers also benefited from the trains as well as warehouses that cropped up along the tracks in Rocky Mount. But mountain agriculture—where no parcel was large enough for such specialization, no railroads or hard surfaced roads passed nearby, and there was no capital to invest anyway—saw no new growth. By 1935, most mountain farms were in worse shape than the returning Confederates had found them seventy years earlier, as ever greater numbers of offspring tried to crowd onto the same property. A few gristmills and...

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