He used to win local shooting matches.Ĭobb is on the rifle team, part of the ROTC program, and when they travel for matches she wears one of the team T-shirts: "They always say 'Alvin C.
Sophomore Paige Cobb knows about York's skill as a marksman, even beyond his wartime action. "Some guys I know used to farm the York bottoms, down by the grist mill and it was some fertile soil that produced some really good crops and good yields." "He came from some rich farmland," Garrett says. Senior Christopher Garrett, who is taking farm management courses, appreciates York's love of the land. That's just a phenomenal statesmanlike quality that very few people ever have." I would probably have not put my farm up, I would probably have not put the amount of effort into working the way that he did. Tompkins points out that "Alvin York could have made himself rich and instead he chose to invest his money into the community. "When you come into our school we expect people to be exceptional." "We have an expectation at our school because we're Sgt. Outside the York Institute, a 600-student school in Jamestown, Tenn. They like to jarred me out of the tobacco patch." "I was out digging potatoes and I hadn't never seen as many helicopters, about as high as the light wires and they was 12 or 15 of them. Important people were coming from all over the United States to pay tribute. Pete Smith, whittling red cedar on the porch, remembers the day of Alvin York's funeral in 1964. But he liked to read, kept a diary, and because of the war had seen a world beyond the ridgeline: London, Paris, New York. York had only finished the third grade in a one-room school. A school that would help his neighbors' kids get the education he had missed. One of the most decorated American heroes of World War I.Īt the end of the war, when he returned to his home here in the mountains of north Tennessee, all he wanted was to build a school.
Alvin York's hair," Richard West recalls. York's rich Tennessee accent.Įvery day, the older neighbors gather on the store's front porch. Here in Pall Mall, Tenn., you can walk up on the front porch of the Forbus General Store, est.