The Blue Ridge Parkway runs through Carroll County 9 miles (14 km) south of Hillsville.

The climate in this area has mild differences between highs and lows, and there is adequate rainfall year-round.

Floyd Allen was on trial for illegal rescue of prisoners, assault and battery, and interfering with deputies.

The charges stemmed from an altercation during which he freed his nephews—who had been arrested for brawling and disrupting a religious service, fled to North Carolina, but were recaptured and being taken to the Carroll county jail—and pistol-whipped a deputy sheriff with his own malfunctioning gun, leaving the officer unconscious.

Prosecutor William Foster (who had won his elective office by defeating another Allen clan member) received death threats but proceeded to trial beginning on March 12.

The next morning, after Floyd was convicted, Judge Thornton Massie refused to set aside the verdict (as had happened in an earlier case), and sentenced Floyd Allen to a year in jail and a $1000 fine, at which point Allen stood up and openly refused to go.

Gunfire erupted between lawmen and Floyd and several Allen family members present at the trial who came to his "aid".

Because Virginia law at the time said deputies' law enforcement powers depended on their sheriff being alive, the assistant court clerk S. Floyd Landreth telegraphed Governor William Hodges Mann, who sent deputies employed by the Baldwin–Felts Detective Agency by train from Roanoke.

The wounded Floyd Allen and his son Victor had stayed in a Hillsville hotel overnight and were arrested the next morning.

However, Sidna Allen and his cousin Wesley Edwards escaped, and were captured months later in Des Moines, Iowa.

For their parts in the fatal melee, Floyd and Claude Allen eventually received the death penalty, and were electrocuted in late March 1913.