York is still remembered in Pall Mall

On the week of Veterans Day, my thoughts have turned to Pall Mall, Tenn.
I traveled through this tiny town late last year while roaming through Jamestown, braving snow showers and exploring parts of the Big South Fork National Recreation Area.
Jamestown, Tenn., should not to be confused, in any way, with the Jamestown of Virginia. It sits just across the Central Time zone from Rugby, Tenn.
And it looks like your typical Tennessee town – with little shops and restaurants plus a museum built out of what was once the local jail.
This is the place where the parents of Samuel Clemens lived – just a few months before he was born – in 1835.
Clemens would become best known by his pen name – Mark Twain. He wrote “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” And, even today, he is regarded as one of America’s finest writers and humorists.
Jamestown cannot claim to be the writer’s birthplace, but town signs are not bashful in saying that this was, in all likelihood, the place where the writer was conceived.
Why, there’s even a little park downtown – a pleasant half-acre – called the “Mark Twain Spring.”
Just a few miles outside of Jamestown lies Pall Mall – the home of the Sgt. Alvin C. York State Historic Area.
Nearly a century ago, Sgt. Alvin C. York single-handedly captured 132 men during World War I and, as a member of the U.S. Army, became America’s most outstanding hero.
Good-natured York, ultimately, returned to his roots as a farmer at Pall Mall, a Tennessee town near the Kentucky border. He died in 1964.
“What makes him probably more famous is what he did after the war – what he did for the people of the area,” said Cletis York, a nephew of the military hero.
“He built a school. He built a summer Bible school up on the old homeplace. He just did a lot.”
York did a lot on film, too, when Gary Cooper played the the military hero in 1941’s critically acclaimed “Sergeant York.”
That film appeared at the onset of World War II and was viewed, then, as a military recruiting tool.
“He took us to the movie in Jamestown, when it came out,” remembered Andrew Jackson York, 79, one of Sgt. York’s sons and a ranger at the historic area. “But he never did talk anything about the movie or anything that happened over there.”
Among the actors in that film, incidentally, is Robert Porterfield, the founder of Barter Theatre of Abingdon, Va.
In Pall Mall, the Sgt. Alvin C. York State Historic Area includes gristmill and a store, which sells Sgt. York souvenirs and shows a short documentary film.
Nearby, just down a country road, I found Sgt. York’s grave at the Wolf River Cemetery.
I stopped. And I thanked that veteran for his service, all those years ago.