The house has been painted by Poverty; but the home is warmed and lit by
a mountain mother's love. The front stoop is a wooden ladder with flat
steps but the entrance to the home is an arbor of honey suckle and
roses.
On summer nights the York boys sat on that stoop and sang, and their
voices floated on the moonbeams out over the valley. The little mother
"pottered" about, with ever a smile on her face for her boys. They were
happy.
It was from this home that Alvin went to war, and it was to it he
returned.
Visitors know, and it is well for others to realize, that Pall Mall and
the "Valley of the Three Forks o' the Wolf" are back among the rising
ranges of the Cumberland Mountains forty-eight miles from the railroad.
Alvin York came from a line of ancestors who were cane-cutters and
Indian fighters. The earliest ancestor of whom he has knowledge was a
"Long Hunter," who with a rifle upon his shoulder strode into the Valley
of the Wolf and homesteaded the river bottom-lands. Here his people
lived far from the traveled paths. Marooned in their mountain
fastnesses, they clung to the customs and the traditions of the past.
Their life was simple, and their sports quaint. They held
shooting-matches on the mountainside, enjoyed "log-rollings" and
"corn-huskings." Strong in their loves and in their hates, they feared
God, but feared no man.
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