Sidna Allen House: Built the Year Before the Courthouse Massacre

Sidna Allen finished building this house in Carroll County, Virginia, in nineteen eleven, the finest home in the county by his own ambition. A year later it was confiscated by the state. On March fourteenth, nineteen twelve, his brother Floyd Allen stood in the Hillsville courthouse to receive a one-year sentence for interfering with an officer.

Floyd announced he was not going to prison. Fifty-seven shots were fired in the next ninety seconds. The judge, the sheriff, the commonwealth's attorney, a juror, and a bystander were killed.

Sidna was convicted of participating, sentenced to thirty-five years, and the house he had just built was taken as part of the judgment against him. He served thirteen years before a pardon. The house survives today as a museum, the grandest monument to an ambition that outlasted the catastrophe that interrupted it.