Sergeant York And His People

by Sam K. Cowan

The Sunday following was Tennessee's Decoration Day. From the mountains for miles around the people came to Pall Mall. During the ceremonies, while the flowers were being placed upon the graves in the little cemetery, they wanted Alvin to talk to them. He and Gracie were seated in the empty bed of an unhitched wagon down at the edge of the grove of forest trees that surrounds the church. He came to the cemetery, and his talk was the untrammelled outpouring of his heart for all that had been done for him. The spirit of the day, with his own people around him, his experiences and the changes that had come into his life since the last decoration services he had attended there, seemed to move him deeply, and here was first displayed a power of oratory which he was so rapidly to develop.

The people of Tennessee began to gather gifts for him before he left France, and the Tennessee Society of New York City entertained him when he left his troop-ship. The people of the South had always remembered with added reverence that Robert E. Lee had declined to commercialize his military fame, while some of the other generals of the Confederacy had sacrificed their reputations upon the altar of expediency. So when it became known that Sergeant York, with no knowledge of history to guide him, but acting from principle, had refused to capitalize the record of the few brief months he had spent in the service of his country, there was nothing within the gift of the people he could not have had.

His welcome home by the State of Tennessee was to be held at the capital on June 9th. But Sergeant York, before he went to war, had given an option—one over which he was showing deep concern. His mountain sweetheart was to "have him for the taking when he got back." So it was mutually—amicably—arranged that the foreclosure proceedings should take place in Pall Mall on June 7th, and their bridal tour would be to Nashville.

It was an out-of-door wedding so that all of the guests in Pall Mall for that day could be present, and they came not only from all parts of Tennessee but from neighboring States. The altar was the rock ledge on the mountainside, above the spring, under the beech trees that arched their boughs into a verdant cathedral dome. It had been their meeting-place when he was an unknown mountain boy and she a golden-haired school-girl. As the sunlight flickered on the trunks of those trees it showed scars of knife carvings that carried the dates of other meetings there.

The swaying boughs were draped with flags and flowers. The ceremony was performed by Governor Roberts of Tennessee, assisted by Rev. Rosier Pile, the pastor of the church in the valley, and Rev. W. T. Haggard, chaplain-general of the Governor's staff. The bridesmaids were Miss Ida Wright, Miss Maud Brier and Miss Adelia Darwin, and Sergeant York's best man was Sergeant Clay Brier, of Jamestown. Their friendship had been proved upon the fields of France. The wedding march was the wind among the laurels and the pines.

The "Welcome Home" for him, at Nashville, by the people of Tennessee, will long be remembered among the public demonstrations of the State. Tennessee has always been proud of the fact that the conduct of her sons in those times when the nation went to war had entitled her to the name of "The Volunteer State." That one of her sons should come back from the World War, having done, in the sum of its accomplishment, that which the Commander of the Armies of the Allies called the greatest feat of valor, while fighting solely on his own resources, of any soldier of all of the armies of Europe, made the welcome one that sprang joyously from the hearts of the people. And that this soldier, while poor and still facing the possibility of a life filled with the deprivation of poverty, with no assurance but the continued labor of his hands, should turn down the offers of fortunes because, to him, they were prompted by a motive that was unworthy—opened the very inner sanctuary of their hearts and the people came with gifts, that he should sustain no loss of opportunity and should never be in need. The offerings were not in money. They were presents from the people. There were fertile acres that he could till, as that was his selection of the life he wished to follow. There was a model, modern house in which he could live, and furnishings for it. There were blooded fowls and stock and farming implements, down to the files for his scythe. The donors were individuals, organizations and communities. Waiting for him was the state's medal which bears the device "Service Above Self." He was appointed a member of the Governor's staff and upon him was conferred the rank of Colonel. This was the wedding trip of Sergeant York and his bride.

To Nashville, in the bridal party, to see and hear the honors to be paid her son went Mrs. York, the mother. It was the first time she had ever seen a railroad-train. And, now, it was Mrs. York's turn. She, too, faced a battalion. Wearing her calico sunbonnet she came suddenly upon the gorgeous social battalion—so fully equipped with the bayonets of class and the machine guns of curiosity. And she captured it! As her son had never seen the man or crowd of men of whom he was afraid, she, with her philosophy of life, looked upon everyone as worthy of friendship and the meeting with them a pleasure and not an occasion for disconcertment. If they approached her with a greeting of wit, her answer was quick and gentle, and as playful as a mountain stream. If their mood was serious, she immediately impressed them with her frankness and her common sense. She went everywhere the program provided, and enjoyed every moment of it. As she was preparing to return home her appreciation was expressed in her declaration that she "intended to come again, when she could go quietly about and really see things—when policemen would not have to make way for her."

Alvin was beginning life anew, decorated with the Distinguished Service Cross and the rare Congressional Medal of Honor, the highest award of his country to a soldier; the Medaille Militaire and the Croix de Guerre with Palm, of France; the Croca di Guerra, of Italy; the War Medal of Montenegro; the Legion of Honor; medals for gallantry from Tennessee and the Methodist Centenary, and the Commonwealth of Rhode Island was beckoning to him, to decorate him with the medal the State's legislature had voted. There were the gifts the people of Tennessee had given him, and others that began to come from all sections of the Union. The mountaineers of the State of Georgia clubbed together and sent a remembrance—and presents came from the far West.

Several cities offered him a home if he would come to live among their people. Communities, wanting him, selected their most desirable farming sites and tendered them. But the "Valley of the Three Forks o' the Wolf" was home to him, and while in France he had said he wished to live "nowhere but at Pall Mall." So the Rotary Clubs, headed by the Nashville organization, raised the fund for the "York Home" through public subscription, and there has been given to him four hundred acres of the "bottom land" of the Valley of the Wolf and one of the timbered mountainsides—land that had been homesteaded and first brought into cultivation by "Old Coonrod" Pile, his pioneer ancestor—land that had remained in the possession of his family until lost in the vicissitudes of the days following the Civil War.

As his residence on his new farm was yet to be built for him, he carried his bride back to the valley and to the little two-room cabin that had been his mother's and his home.