Edgewood and the Stanley Company Town

The Greek Revival mansion called Edgewood was built around eighteen thirty in what was then open farmland in Henry County, Virginia. Ninety-four years later, that farmland became the site of one of the most deliberate acts of community building in the Virginia Piedmont: the founding of Stanley Furniture and the town that grew up entirely around it.

Thomas Bahnson Stanley had worked for Bassett Furniture, the dominant employer in Henry County, before deciding in early nineteen twenty-four to strike out on his own. He brought in his nephew Fred Stanley and his brother John Stanley as partners, and they chose one hundred fifty acres of former pasture in Henry County for their factory. The building was one hundred fifty thousand square feet. Stanley understood immediately that a factory this large in a rural county would need a workforce, and a workforce would need somewhere to live. So he built that too.

Stanleytown was laid out around the factory: streets platted, roughly one hundred homes constructed, utilities installed. The company owned the houses and the surrounding land. The community that formed around the Edgewood mansion and the new factory was entirely an artifact of one man's business decision, a classic American company town planted in the Virginia tobacco country.

Thomas Stanley's ambitions extended beyond furniture. He entered politics, serving in the Virginia House of Delegates and then the United States House of Representatives. In nineteen fifty-four he became governor of Virginia. His term coincided with the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown versus Board of Education, and Stanley aligned himself with the Massive Resistance movement and supporting policies designed to block school integration. That political legacy stands in complicated tension with the paternalistic community he built.

Edgewood itself, the antebellum house that preceded everything else on this land, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in two thousand seven. The furniture factory operated for decades after Stanley's death, and the town bearing the family name still clusters around it today.