Sergeant Alvin York: The Reluctant Hero

The farm you are passing through has the look of a place time forgot on purpose. The Wolf River Valley opens wide here at Pall Mall, Tennessee, and the log cabin on this property is the kind of building that seems to grow from the ground rather than be placed on it. This is where Alvin Cullum York was born on December thirteenth, eighteen eighty-seven, and it is where he returned after he became one of the most celebrated soldiers in American history.

York was the third of eleven children, raised in a two-room log cabin in the mountains of Fentress County. The family was poor in the way that mountain poverty is particular: resourceful, self-sufficient, and largely cut off from the wider world. York became an exceptional marksman out of necessity, hunting to feed his family. He was also, in the years before the war, a heavy drinker. The death of a close friend in a barroom fight shook him profoundly, and in nineteen fifteen he joined the pacifist Church of Christ in Christian Union. When his draft notice arrived in nineteen seventeen, he applied for conscientious objector status. The Army denied it.

What happened on the morning of October eighth, nineteen eighteen, on the Meuse-Argonne Front in France, became the most-told story of the war. York's platoon, moving through dense forest, stumbled behind German lines and was caught in a devastating ambush. More than half the patrol fell in the opening seconds. What followed was an act of extraordinary individual combat: York, using skills honed on Tennessee hillsides, picked off German machine-gunners one by one, then led a charge that resulted in the capture of one hundred thirty-two prisoners. He was promoted to sergeant and awarded the Medal of Honor.

York came home to a hero's welcome he neither sought nor fully trusted. A Nashville civic organization gifted him a four-hundred-acre farm here in the valley, the same property you are passing now. He used his fame not for personal gain but to build a school. The Alvin C. York Agricultural Institute, which York championed through the nineteen twenties and which opened its doors in nineteen twenty-nine, offered free education to mountain children who had no other access to high school. York lived and died on this land, and the State of Tennessee turned it into a historic park in nineteen sixty-seven, three years after his death.