Private Paul Stewart Furr

26 Jan 1896 -- Strasburg, Shenandoah County, Virginia, USA

6 Sep 1918 -- Meucon, Morbihan, Brittany, France

Saint Johns United Church of Christ Cemetery

Harrisville, Shenandoah County, Virginia

111th Field Artillery, Battery B

Letter From Paul Furr Who Is Now In France

Somewhere in France, July 19, 1918.

Dearest Folk: Will write you all a few lines as we don’t have anything to do this afternoon. This Is Saturday and you know we always have our Saturday afternoons off. We are stationed in a small French village, and it is one of the most beautiful places I ever saw. I always thought Virginia was the prettiest place in the world, but France has it knocked off the map. I wouldn’t take thousands of dollars for the trip so far, and I haven’t seen half that I expect to before I come back. The people here treat one fine, and you might to see and hear the boys trying to speak French. Some of them are getting along fine. I can speak a little of it and I hope to stay here long enough to learn to speak it well. The French people are as anxious to learn our language as we are theirs. I have not heard from you all yet. Guess I shall hear from you in a couple of weeks. Will close for this time. Answer this with a long letter. I am well and happy. Don’t worry about me.

Your son, Paul.

Paul E. Furr “B” Battery, 111 F. A.

American Expeditionary Forces.

Strasburg News, September 5, 1918

COUNTY DEAD RETURNS FROM FRANCE - Paul Furr, Who Died in the Service Over-Seas, Returns to Rest in His Native Land, dated 22 September 1920

Back to the land of their birth, back from the sacred ground of France upon which they died they are returning, sons of America, members of the Golden Legion who died that all men might be free. Each week the great gray transports arrive at American ports bearing their load of America's sacred dead back to their native land. They are coming back at last, the "buddies" who were left behind when the great hosts of olive drab sailed so joyfully for home.

And so has the body of Paul Stewart Furr, an American soldier, and a son of Shenandoah County been returned to America. Mr. Stewart Furr of Strasburg, Va., received a communication from the government the latter part of the week stating that the body of his son had arrived in New York and would be shipped to Strasburg at the earliest possible date. Furr will be the first American soldier who died over-seas to be returned to Shenandoah County. The body upon its arrival at Strasburg will be conveyed to the Harrisville cemetery, near Toms Brook, and there interred.

As Paul Furr is one of the first of Shenandoah County dead to return from over-seas, so was he one of the first to leave the county and to enlist in the service of this country. He enlisted in the Norfolk Blues, Light Artillery, in the month of April, 1917, at Norfolk. He was transferred to Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, soon after his enlistment and later to Anniston, Alabama. He sailed for France as a member of the 111th Field Artillery, Battery B, 29th Division, in the month of July, 1918. He had been in France but a brief month before, as a result of the exposure and fatigue of the severe training; he contracted double pneumonia and after an illness of several days died at Base Hospital camp de Meucon, France.

His body was interred in the cemetery near the hospital and there it has rested 'neath its slender wooden cross marked by the little aluminum identification until its recent transfer to one of the great concentration cemeteries and still more recently to the transport which bore it to the United States.

Mr. Furr of Strasburg at the time of this writing was not able to say at just the exact time that the body would arrive in the county, but thought that it would be within a few days. And so even as Paul Stewart Furr has now come back "to the land of youth and freedom beyond the ocean of bars, where the air is full of stars", so too he will soon return to the particular county of that land in which he was born and will be given a final resting place in a quiet countryside, that he knew long ago in the days when he was a boy and when war and France were far off, things indeed.

And as he returns let it be remembered that he died a man and a soldier, and that to him is due all the honor that would always be accorded to him who pays that last price in serving his county and flag.