Homer Givens, First American Hero of World War One

A Florence teenager was once hailed as America's first hero of the First World War. Corporal Homer Givens, of Company F, Sixteenth Infantry, grew up just north of here. In an early, ferocious clash on the Western Front in France, his comrades fell around him until he stood alone.

Givens managed to kill three enemy soldiers before he was cut down himself, his body torn by many pieces of shrapnel. He survived. For his courage the French government awarded him the Croix de Guerre for valor and hailed him as the war's first American hero.

Homer Givens lived from eighteen ninety-eight to nineteen seventy-one, and Florence remembers him on its Walk of Honor.