Bassett Furnituremakers

The Bassett Furnituremakers played in the Bi-State League from 1935 through 1940, based in Bassett, Virginia, a company town built almost entirely around the Henry County furniture manufacturing industry. The Furnituremakers were the league's dominant franchise, winning three consecutive championships from 1936 through 1938 and reaching the finals again in 1940, where they lost a seven-game series to the Martinsville Manufacturers. In 1936, player-manager and pitcher Lefty Jenkins went 25-5 with a .833 winning percentage while leading the team to its first title.

In 1937, the Yankees assigned a 19-year-old Brooklyn shortstop named Phil Rizzuto to Bassett as his first professional posting. Rizzuto hit .310 with 5 home runs in 67 games and won a championship in his debut season. He later recalled arriving in Bassett and not finding the town until the train pulled away from the platform: thirteen hundred people, a drugstore, a post office, and a diner, with a Brooklyn accent that nobody in Henry County could quite follow. Rizzuto went on to spend his entire 13-year major league career with the Yankees, winning seven World Series titles, the 1950 AL MVP award, and a Hall of Fame induction in 1994, followed by forty years as the voice of Yankees broadcasts.

Bassett was affiliated with the New York Yankees from 1936 to 1937, the Cincinnati Reds in 1939, and the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1940. The Bi-State League was a Class D circuit that ran from 1934 through 1942, fielding teams from the tobacco, textile, and furniture country straddling the Virginia-North Carolina border. The league did not resume after World War II.