A Small World

The global economy has rocked the foundations of this rural Virginia community_including its schools.

By Sean Cavanagh

Henry County, Va.

The sewing rooms hummed and the classrooms bustled for as long as anybody here could recall, as entwined in the landscape and memory as the railroads and rivers winding through these small company towns.

For years, the promise of a job in the textile and apparel mills was good enough to lure high school grads and fresh-off-the-farm tobacco growers, who came looking for steady paychecks and found them, spinning yarn, stitching cuffs, and dyeing lots, day after day, shift after shift.

With time, and tons of fabric and cloth, they spun an outsized reputation for this otherwise out-of-the-way region, earning anonymous spots like Martinsville (pop. 15,416) brash titles like the "Sweatshirt Capital of the World." But by the mid-1990s, thousands of workers in Henry County had...