Fentress Feud

Through Tennessee's remote, mountainous Fentress County runs one modern paved road-the Alvin C. York Memorial Highway. On the highway at Jamestown, the county seat, stands one modern brick building-the Alvin C. York Agricultural Institute. Not in the Institute last week was its founder, Fentress County's beefy, red-headed first citizen. He sat in gloomy exile at his farm at Pall Mall, six miles away.

When Sergeant Alvin Cullum York, after killing 25 Germans singlehanded and capturing 132 more with a squad of seven men, returned to Fentress County as the "greatest civilian soldier of the War," he promptly married his childhood sweetheart, Gracie Williams, with Tennessee's Governor performing the ceremony. His next wish was to build a good school for the neighbors' children. Hero York raised $10,000 by a lecture tour, Tennessee put up $50,000 and proud Fentress County pledged $50,000 more. In 1929 the Alvin C. York Agricultural Institute opened its doors, offered young mountaineers a respectable education through high school in addition to training in farming and trades. Each morning busses rumbled the 3 2-mile length of Fentress County, picking up pupils along the highway.

Sergeant York, whose own education stopped at the third grade, became the Institute's president and business manager without salary. The State Board of Education appointed principal and staff, contributed $7,500 a year for salaries, light, fuel. Sergeant York eked this out with the proceeds of more lectures and, when the economizing State cut off bus service two years ago, bought busses, hired drivers out of his own pocket.

Year ago the Institute was humming along nicely with 150 pupils when Sergeant York abruptly asked the Board of Education to remove the Institute's principal, Henry Clay Brier. In Fentress County a bloodless feud instantly was declared. Yorkites darkly accused Principal Brier of misconduct. Brierites countercharged that the quarrel was over the principal's treatment of the school janitor, Sergeant York's brother. When the trouble came to a head fortnight ago, the Board met, accepted the resignations of both Founder York-who at the same time declined the Prohibition Party's Vice Presidential nomination-and Principal Brier.

From Pall Mall, last week, Sergeant York grimly began to round up his friends in the State Legislature, persuade them to take the Institute out of the hands of the School Board and turn it over entirely to him. Boycotting the Institute were the Sergeant's children-Alvin Jr., 15; George Edward Buxton (named for the Sergeant's War-time major), 12; Woodrow Wilson, 10; Andrew Jackson, 5; Betsy Ross, 3. Snorted Alvin C. York when the Board offered to make him the Institute's "honorary president": "I am like the late Cal Coolidge. I do not choose to run."