Talk:Martinsville, Indiana

message: The links to martinsville high school link to the wrong martinsville high school. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 66.185.71.194 (talk) 03:31, 26 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The article for Martinsville High School was deleted, and is now a link for the school with the same name in Virginia.  I removed the linkage, but left the text. Boomcoach 13:41, 9 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Martinsville High School 

message: I edited the Martinsville, Indiana page.  I apology for the formatting as I am just learning Wikipedia's code.  I am used to HTML.  Give me a week and I will have the article corrected.  
Some errors I corrected or deleted:
* There were over 12 sanitariums in Martinsville including the first black sanitarium.  It may have been the first black sanitarium in the United States, but I cannot verify that at the moment and am still looking for that source.
* The person murdered in Martinsville was not a teenager, but a 21-year-old woman. 
 
* There was no Klan rally and march in Martinsville 1967.  The city leaders refused to allow it, but they found no legal way to stop the Klan's motorcade from driving around the square.  The city leaders asked that all residents not go to the square and ignore the Klan's actions.  As a result the Klan's visit to Martinsville was a nonevent, which is perhaps that is why the Klan never returned to Martinsville (last sentence simply my comment, not something I added to the article).
* I deleted the following, "According to the Southern Poverty Law Center's Hate Groups Map for the state of Indiana from 2005[2], there is no Ku Klux Klan Chapter in Martinsville, although it does refer to a group called 'Council Of Conservative Citizens'."  I could not find anything to substantiate the comment except the old (2002 I think) blurp on the Southern Poverty Law Center's Web site. I checked Reporter articles, the Council Of Conservative Citizens' Web site, which has no listing for Martinsville at all, and the only reference I could find was to a scheduled meeting (no evidence as to whether it actually took place) on Southern Poverty Law Center Web site.  I cannot even currently locate that reference on their Web site.  Barring any proof that the meeting actually took place and that this organization has a presence in Martinsville/Morgan County I see no reason for the inclusion of this information.  The information is not verifiable.
Added new historical information:
I am the digital archivist for the Morgan County Library and I added a lot of new historical information and added to the list of names of notables.  
I will be contacting members of the historical society and city leaders to see if they will add information.
NOTE:  Regarding the African American/racial incidents in Martinsville, while I admit it is much more titillating to focus on the very few racial incidents that has occurred in the area, IMO it gives a much factual picture of Martinsville, the surrounding area and its residents if those incidents are balanced with the hundreds of African Americans who have safely lived and worked in the area for over a hundred years.  
There may be facts that the other authors here might be unaware of.  Here is an article by one of Morgan County's historians - http://scican3.scican.net/bh/index.html.  
VLH2375 10:07, 12 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Corrections, updates, and comments 

message: VLH2375 added a ton of excellent information.  I have started to reformat the various links and cites throughout the article.  My goals are:
*Add reference section
*Change links that should be citations to reference format
*When possible, change external links to textual links (see Historical Photographs example in opening)
*Wikilink internal articles.
This should allow the numbered citations to be actual citations, reduce the numbers.  The article was up to citation 26, the vast majority of which were not actual citations.Boomcoach 14:35, 12 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Reformatting

message: Broomcoach is there any way I can just send you the material I have and can get?  I can write the copy and provide verification, but since I have yet to learn the code Wikipedia uses it might be helpful if we could work together.  Please, do not misunderstand I fully intend to learn the code.  I am just in a time crunch right now.  VLH2375 10:48, 13 June 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Question

message: I reverted the anonymous deletion of the information about the murder.  As many people who have some familiarity with Martinsville know of the incident, it seems wrong to ignore it, and the explanation clears up misconceptions. Boomcoach 01:42, 16 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Deletion of history

message: The racial makeup of the city was remarkably homogeneous, with 98.62% of Martinsville's residents claiming White
What?  How is a town's being nearly pure white remarkable?  Your use of the language has lost me.IanHistor (talk) 18:54, 27 July 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: ''remarkability''

message: I wanted to go ahead and explain my changes on the main page to avoid any kind of edit war.  First of all I think the Carol Jenkins murder, if it deserves mentioning under Martinsville's history (and frankly I don't know that it is quite THAT notable, but whatever), it should have its own section.  As it was it just kind of came out of nowhere right after normal run-of-the-mill factoids.  
Second, I removed and changed two bits that seem to indicate a certain bias or slant.  The first part was that I changed the sentence about Martinsville "enduring charges..."  Using the word enduring and thus describing Martinsville as a poor victim of enormous persecution that had to endure this terrible burden is a little bit over the top.  Yes it added to the perception that Martinsville is racist, so just leave it at that unless you can provide sources that Martinsville was targeted or its citizens had to "endure" something out of the ordinary as a result of this murder.  Also, while I see no reason to speculate that the cops dragged their feet or refused to investigate the crime, saying the murder was nearly impossible to solve is idle speculation.  Cops solve crimes all the time when the criminal is from out of town or where there is little initial evidence.  Saying it was nearly impossible is as much baseless speculation as saying they should have been able to solve it.  Bottom line here is without some source saying that these conditions made it very difficult to solve the case, it's just an unsourced opinion and should be removed.
Third, part of my problem with the whole "Martinsville endured accusations..." is that the paragraph seemed to have a tone that suggested that this murder was somehow the only accusation of racism or racial problems in Martinsville.  Anyone from Martinsville is full of it if they suggest that there have been no other episodes of racial tension, and you know you are full of it.  Martinsville has a long running (and well deserved) reputation of racism and general bigotry, and no it wasn't just because of the Carol Jenkins episode.  So I added the fact that the Jenkins murder wasn't the sole basis of Martinsville's reputation (with a valid source) lest the reader get the idea that somehow a racist town like Martinsville has been completely exonerated just because Jenkins's murderer turned out to be from another county.Jdlund (talk) 19:48, 19 March 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Carol Jenkins murder

message: I apologize if I offend anyone by moving the entries from the first section into the businesses section, as it was becoming just a list of businesses, rather than emphasizing anything specific about Martinsville itself. It also was implying that any businesses listed were popular, due to choice of wording. I realize the editor was attempting to add content, hence me explaining my choice here. My actual addition to the businesses entry is generic, I realize, and I welcome people to fix that. If I had more time, I'd add things about shelters and activity areas in Martinsville.
I've also moved the Carol Jenkins murder down, but not to de-emphasize it. I've looked at other wiki pages as examples, and many place notable events near this area. This also allows a spot for articles on events like the recent shooting, which I tried to write out myself but had trouble finding unlocked news articles on. The name 'Notable Events' itself is in lieu of a better choice of words; I just used the title commonly used for this area.
I've also started a festival section with the few I could think of off the top of my head. I invite others to add entries and links. Tanyuu (talk) 03:57, 14 November 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Hey! I don't think the reason they deleted it is that they think you're "making things up". More like, it's not really appropriate for this particular page as well as several issues with the way it's written (I think I saw you mention in Teahouse that you were new here). I am not familiar with this particular story, but it may be notable enough to have its own page. If the story is notable, it may be worthy of a 2-3 sentence blurb on the Martinsville page, but it otherwise doesn't fit with the flow of this particular page, not to mention the point of it to put in a really long description of the murder there. Why don't you copy and paste the story in your sandbox and I'll help you edit it there. When it's up to snuff, I'll help you post it as its own page. :-) Bali88 (talk) 03:39, 3 March 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Various Edits 

message: Should the 2008 flood be mentioned?  It's an event that still has marks on the city today.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dr Hugsy McFur (talk • contribs) 19:19, 18 March 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  2008 Flood 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Something that may be considered for achieving notability guidelines is the fact that the majority of the town is a superfund site. https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/cursites/csitinfo.cfm?id=0508678 I would argue that this is notable because it affects every citizen and has been a political point of contention for the city's memorable history, the groundwater plume(s) having existed since at least 1986. It contributes to Martinsville's County, Morgan, having the second highest cancer rate in the state due to the presence of PCEs and TCEs in the municipal water. https://statecancerprofiles.cancer.gov/incidencerates/index.php?stateFIPS=18&cancer=001&race=00&sex=0&age=001&type=incd&sortVariableName=rate&sortOrder=default#results
Conrad Thompson (talk) 22:28, 7 April 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Martinsville Superfund Site 

message: There have been some major changes to the various population figures on the page in the last few months, I've unilaterally made some changes because of how drastically incorrect the figures were, but someone with more experience and know-how should probably clean it up further. My source for the numbers came from the 2020 Census: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/popest/technical-documentation/research/evaluation-estimates/2020-evaluation-estimates/2010s-cities-and-towns-total.html
The >30k figure is wildly wrong, I've seen a few numbers floating around all in the 11-12k range and they're all vastly more reasonable then whats been on the page for months now. GuyFox5 (talk) 00:40, 13 July 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Yeah, I noticed too. If you look in the history, there's a series of edits by an anonymous account that were semi-corrected, but then another account (likely the same person) came in and added more made up numbers. It's hard to tell what parts remain from the prank, but hopefully they'll get ironed out. Tanyuu (talk) 23:11, 15 November 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Population Discrepancies 

message: Read many years ago about an Indiana town that was about to be abandoned, left as a ghost town, because, of the over-abundance of mosquitoes. Then, someone heard that Purple Martin birds loved eating mosquitoes. Special birdhouses were put up, designed to attract these birds. The birds came; the town survived. In honor of the birds, the town was renamed as: "Martinsville". Don't remember if previous town name was given. According to the Martinsville website, the town's surveyor was named John Martin(s), and, the town was named after him. It doesn't seem logical that both stories of how the town was named could be right, so, which way was it? 97.130.175.2 (talk) 21:19, 27 September 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Mosquitoes