![]() The youngest of Everett and Siller (Beasley) Hill’s 12 children, she grew up on a farm about seven miles from Mount Airy. “I never gave up of not seeing him any more.” “God was with us all the time,” she said in her family memoirs. It would be January 31, 1945, before she knew for sure and February before Henry’s postcards reached her. She received a telegram from the War Department in November telling her Henry was missing but they didn’t know if he was alive or dead. Myrtle Hill Wagoner lived in Mount Airy with her in-laws while Henry was deployed. “November 26th, Dear Myrtle, Just a few lines to let you know that I am well. They gave him a pencil and a postcard to write home. The next several days were a swirl of disjointed memories: the soldiers helped him to walk when he was conscious and carried him when he was not he was loaded in an ambulance, then a train taken to a hospital in Dusseldorf his hair was shorn the shrapnel removed Allied planes bombed the city. The battle had moved on and two German soldiers loomed over him with a rifle. Shrapnel hit his head and he was knocked to the ground unconscious. “It rained and spit snow every day,” he said in his memoirs. Henry Wagoner advanced with his company across the German countryside near Aachen on a bitterly cold November day in 1944. The post cards and telegrams are among the items the family allowed the Mount Airy Museum of Regional History to scan so this hometown love story and its unique perspective of life here will be preserved. She wrote back to him, but he was never given the letters. Henry was captured in November 1944, and he wrote several post cards then and in December to tell her he was well and to ask for her prayers, but they didn’t arrive in Mount Airy until February. 31, 1945, telling her he was a prisoner of war. The first telling her that Henry was missing in action. Myrtle received two telegrams from the US War Department. Henry’s recollections of being wounded and captured in Nazi Germany are harrowing while Myrtle’s memories of more practical events of a couple’s life are sweet and at times heartbreaking. They interviewed the couple and created simple memoirs that preserved their experiences and perspective on some of the most momentous events of the 20th century and some of the most mundane, but no less important, aspects of everyday life. Pictured is the sock knitting room of a Mount Airy mill thought to be Renfro in the 1930s when Myrtle was hired.įamily members made a display of Henry’s memorabilia from his WWII service, including one of his two Purple Hearts and a small soldier’s Bible. Their income became an important element in the improvement of the standard of living for many families. This was the first time many women in the region entered the workforce. “I was making big money now!” she said in her family memoirs. She made $8 a week while training but once she learned to loop and operate the knitting machines she was paid a half cent per dozen pairs of socks. She went every week to ask for a job at Renfro Mill on Willow Street Mount Airy until the manager gave in and hired her. ![]() As the Great Depression and a prolonged bout of dry weather made it more difficult for local farmers to pay the bills, many got factory jobs, Myrtle Hill among them. Surry County’s many textile mills were a major part of the engine that drove the area’s economy in the early 20th century. They were eventually bought by Bassett Furniture which then closed operations in 2005. Airy Mantel and Table in 1974 to form National Mount Airy Furniture company. According to his wife’s memoirs, he was paid $12 per week, Monday through Saturday morning, including the day they married. He worked at National Furniture Company, pictured here in the 1940s looking north along Factory Street. Henry Wagoner, like many young men in Surry County at the time, found employment in one of the area’s manufacturing facilities where hourly wages, and a set work schedule offered them the possibility of moving up. ![]() Many of their customers were mill workers who walked to work and would stop on the way in or the way home to get a drink or a little something to eat. He and Myrtle moved in with his mother to make it easier. After Ray’s death in May 1946, Henry left National Furniture to run the store. Ray and his wife lived across the road from the store. Henry’s father, Ray, ran Wagoner’s Grocery, on Bluemont Road, Mount Airy.
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