Andrew Doss has finally found a digital home for precious memories from the Bassett Furniture Company. He has long been digitizing documents from the company, especially from the Bassett Pioneer, an old newsletter about the company. With the help of colleague Michael Taylor, the duo has helped photos and articles find a permanent home on the internet.
Doss felt that joining Bassett Furniture in 2017 was more than a career move. He is a fourth-generation employee and local historian. When he arrived, he was curious about what records he could find of the rest of his family.
Early on, a talk with the human resources department pointed him toward something he hadn’t expected. Tucked away in an old file cabinet was a drawer full of the Bassett Pioneer, a corporate newsletter that started in 1962, ran for more than 40 years and read less like a company bulletin and more like a small-town newspaper.
“The Pioneer covered far more than company news. Weddings, births, and deaths of employees and their relatives filled its pages, alongside the usual milestones and announcements, making it an unexpected goldmine for anyone researching the families who built their lives around the company and the town,” Doss said.
He started small, pulling scans of photos featuring his grandfather and mother. Then co-worker Michael Taylor raised a simple question that changed everything, including scanning and uploading.
“I am a second generation Bassett Furniture employee, and while I was looking through the Bassett Pioneer I found baby pictures of myself and photos of both of my parents, as well as photos of my friends’ parents. As I began sharing some of these photos around, I realized the positive impact it could have. My friends loved seeing photos of their parents at work and being younger,” said Taylor.
From that point, Doss was all in. He scanned through mornings, lunch and his afternoons to preserve the documents. The Pioneer’s pages are legal size, each one requiring individual attention.
After scanning, he would load the images into Photoshop, carefully straightening and restoring pages where age had dulled the contrast. He also built a systematic numbering convention for every issue, making the growing archive something he could actually navigate.
Over the years, the issues became something more than a project to him, each one familiar and carrying its own small piece of the community’s story.
The images eventually became the backbone of a Facebook group Doss created called “Bassett – Looking back. Moving forward.” The page today counts more than 14,000 members. In the early days especially, the Pioneer photos were what kept people coming back.
“The Facebook group took off pretty quickly. At the time, there was no dedicated Bassett history page, so it was well-received. Many of the first to join were excited to see photos of themselves and their relatives on the job at Bassett Furniture,” said Taylor.
That connection was tested in 2020, when Doss was hospitalized with pneumonia for two weeks. Taylor, who knew where Doss kept the external drive holding all the scanned images, stepped up and kept the Facebook group running in his absence.
“In 2020, Andy was down pretty bad in the hospital and unable to make posts. Our group users were accustomed to regular history posts, so I couldn’t let them all down. I went through the archives which Andy had scanned to find photos which had not been posted yet and scanned some of my own issues of the Bassett Pioneer, which had not been digitized. One such topic was very relevant; Andy was in the hospital in March 2020, around the time COVID-19 exploded. In one of the Pioneers I found a photo of Paul Foley receiving his flu shot from Dr. John P. Bing in 1969. Content like this kept the group going even while Andy was unable to post.”
When Doss returned and picked the project back up, he noticed something troubling — holes in the archive where issues should have been. He brought the problem to his Facebook community, and they came through. Members made their way to the main office and dropped off their personal copies in person, filling the gaps one by one until at least 30 years of the Bassett Pioneer were fully intact.
With the archive in good shape and Bassett’s 125th anniversary on the horizon in 2027, Doss and company leadership agreed the time was right to give the collection a real public home. He contacted Kelley Ewing, senior cataloger for the Virginia Chronicle newspaper program at the Library of Virginia, who was excited about both the collection and the fact that the scanning work was already done.
“That meant the library’s contractor could move straight to OCR without starting from scratch. Twenty years of the Bassett Pioneer are now live on the Virginia Chronicle, fully searchable by name, place, and keyword, putting decades of Henry County history at the fingertips of former employees, their families, and descendants for the first time,” Doss said, adding that he hopes to add another decade of scans in the years ahead.
The reach of Bassett Furniture’s story, Doss has come to understand, stretches far beyond the town that shares its name. Generations of families have scattered across the country since their grandparents and great-grandparents worked the factory floors, carrying that history with them without always having a way to connect back to it. He hopes the Bassett Pioneer on Virginia Chronicle serves as that bridge, a way for people who may have never set foot in Bassett to find a grandfather’s name, a family wedding announcement or a photo that brings an old story to life.
CAPTIONS:
Images of factory workers, like the one of Doss’ grandfather, Wilbert Stone, can be found throughout the 20 years of issues. (Contributed)
