The site of Sgt. Alvin C. York’s famous World War I heroics has been definitively placed in a rural town near Luxembourg, France.
At a press conference today, a team of professors from Middle Tennessee State and Tennessee Technical Universities announced the findings of a 9-day excavation trip last month. They used Global Positioning Satellites along with archived maps drawn by York himself to determine a general location of the skirmish.
Tennessee Tech professor Michael Birdwell is considered the foremost York historian. He says mapping technology made finding the site possible, and 14-hundred artifacts collected there helped. But Birdwell says it was a quarter-sized piece of metal that sealed it.
“This collar disk, if you’ll notice 328-G, that’s the 328th company G. That’s York’s company. This makes it very, very clear that we are in the right location, and this came more than likely from one of the six soldiers who was killed.”
York grew up as a poor farmer’s son in Pall Mall, Tennessee, becoming a sharp-shooter at an early age. He’s known as possibly the greatest World War I hero for his leadership in over-taking a German machine-gun post, killing 25 Germans and capturing more than 100 others with just 17 men.
York earned the Congressional Medal of Honor and later used his political weight to champion education.
Artifacts pulled from the site in France will be catalogued and handed over to the state museum for display.
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