Henry County is portrayed through its connection to Martinsville, Virginia, and the surrounding communities: a once-prosperous industrial region where factory closures left deep economic distress. The county’s rising unemployment, food-assistance claims, and disability rates make it a concrete measure of rural decline, while the limits of local reporting help explain why that decline could remain largely unseen beyond the region.

Industrial Setting

Martinsville, Virginia, sits at the center of the account of Henry County’s economic upheaval. In 2012, the city had about 13,000 residents and had held Virginia’s highest unemployment rate for twelve years. During much of the twentieth century it had been an industrial powerhouse, known for textile and furniture factories and an unusually high concentration of millionaires.

That prosperity eroded as production moved elsewhere. Nearly half of Martinsville’s jobs disappeared: textile work shifted to Honduras and Mexico, followed by furniture work moving to China. The loss was not simply a change in what the region made. It removed the factory employment on which communities had depended, while promises that displaced workers would move into better-paid, more advanced jobs often failed to materialize.

Economic Distress in the County

In Martinsville and the surrounding Henry County, unemployment rose above 20 percent, food-stamp claims more than tripled, and disability rates increased by 60.4 percent. These measures describe a regional contraction extending beyond the shuttering of individual plants: fewer jobs coincided with greater dependence on public assistance and more people receiving disability benefits.

The book also sets those figures beside scenes from nearby communities. In Bassett, Virginia, an unemployed 34-year-old trying to remove copper wire from an abandoned furniture factory for resale accidentally started a fire that destroyed the closed building. The episode turns industrial decline into a specific consequence: a former workplace, emptied of its productive use, became the setting for an attempt to recover value from what remained.

A Wider Crisis, Not a Local Explanation

Henry County belongs to the book’s account of rural communities bearing the costs of economic change, but the evidence does not reduce the opioid crisis to a single cause or establish a county-specific chain from factory closures to addiction. Instead, the region provides a setting for considering how work disappeared and hardship accumulated as the national opioid epidemic developed. The distinction matters: economic distress describes conditions that shaped people’s lives, not a complete explanation of any individual’s drug use.

The regional story also sits alongside the book’s account of a wider opioid supply and the institutions responding to it. Its discussion of pharmaceutical promotion, regulatory oversight, and drug enforcement ranges across the country; those events are not presented as having taken place in Henry County. The county’s significance is the social landscape it makes visible, rather than a claim that every national development occurred locally.

The Limits of Visibility

The book emphasizes that the communities facing this decline were poorly served by shrinking news coverage. Local papers such as the Martinsville Bulletin were not positioned to investigate international trade decisions in Washington or New York, much less the influence of pharmaceutical companies or global drug networks. Regional newspapers, including the Roanoke Times, had also narrowed their reporting toward urban and suburban areas, leaving distressed hinterland communities less visible just when sustained coverage was needed.

That absence of attention becomes part of Henry County’s narrative significance. The employment losses and rising measures of hardship were not hidden because they lacked consequences, but because the institutions that might have connected local experience to national policy and economic change had limited reach. Henry County thus appears both as a place transformed by deindustrialization and as a place whose transformation was easy for the rest of the country to overlook.