Category: History

History

The Saltville Muck Dam Tragedy

by Wayne Jordan
in Blue Ridge Life

Reading Time: 6 minutesBackground: The Saltville Muck Dam broke around eight o’clock on Christmas Eve,1924. The dam held back a pond filled with 27 years of chemical waste released by the Mathieson Alkali Works. When the dam broke, a 100-foot-high wall of toxic sludge cascaded down the Holston River, destroying homes and farms, killing 19 people, and rendering the river lifeless for decades. […]

Floyd Allen And The Hillsville Courthouse Massacre

by Wayne Jordan
in Blue Ridge Life

Reading Time: 3 minutesIt started with a kiss and ended with a courtroom shootout. Five people died, and seven were wounded. A year and two weeks later, Floyd Allen and his son Claude were executed in Virginia’s electric chair for the courthouse murders. The kiss lit the fuse on a pre-existing political powder keg. Floyd’s nephew Wesley Edwards, was at a corn shucking […]