Alvin C. York

Alvin Cullum York was a Fentress County farmer and a man of a church that did not love killing when the draft found him. He went anyway. On October 8, 1918, in the Argonne, his patrol was cut up. York, then a corporal, worked the rifle and the pistol until a German machine-gun nest and the men around it stopped. The army counted a large bag of prisoners. The Medal of Honor citation is in the record. Later Hollywood would add lighting.

He came home to the Valley of the Three Forks of the Wolf and tried to spend the fame on schools. He died in Nashville on September 2, 1964. This page will not turn a conscientious marksman into a cartoon. It will say a Tennessee soldier did a morning's work that the division could measure, and then spent the rest of a life trying to be useful without a camera.