His death led to an outpouring of emotion in the city and none so much as from his mother Alice Gresham Dodd. In looking back at his story, one sees a young man of humble origins who endeavored to help his impoverished family and ultimately lost his life in service to his country.
James Bethel Gresham was born on August 23, 1893, in McLean County, Kentucky, to Alice and Green Gresham. Green, a Civil War veteran, was a farmer whose family lived in a one-room log cabin. After Green’s death in 1899, Alice initially moved James and his siblings—he had two brothers and two sisters—to Henderson, Kentucky, and, in 1901, to Evansville.
The next year, in a ceremony performed by Reverend Albert Bennett of the Simpson Methodist Episcopal Church, Alice married William Dodd a watchman at the Evansville Cotton Mill where she was employed as a laborer. The family initially lived in the Cotton Mill Block on the grounds of the company and then resided in various residences on the city’s west side.
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Purportedly a poor student with a stutter, James attended Centennial School on 12th Avenue between Illinois and Indiana Streets through the fourth grade. At this juncture he quit school and began working. (Child labor amongst the poor was common in the early 20th century though reform minded progressives sought a remedy to this practice.) He also attended Sunday school at the Cotton Mill and subsequently services at Simpson Methodist Episcopal Church.
In the labor force, young Gresham worked as a teamster and later at the Evansville Metal Bed Company before joining the Army at the age of 20 in April of 1914. At least one, perhaps apocryphal, story of his youth relates that he was at odds with his stepfather William Dodd who supposedly did little or was unable to support his family, and that this spurred Gresham’s entry into military service. Gresham was assigned to Jefferson Barracks in St. Louis for basic training. Underweight and small, Gresham built his physical stature while in the Army.
In the period prior to World War I, Gresham participated in the Mexican Expedition under the command of General John “Blackjack” Pershing. This expedition was in response to attacks by Pancho Villa and his men on Americans in Mexico and in the southwestern United States. Though the mission failed to capture Villa—292 of his followers were killed or taken prisoner—this incursion did give U. S. soldiers experience in combat operations on the verge of the country’s entry into World War I.
On April 6, 1917, the United States declared war on Germany and officially entered World War I on the side of the Allies. Two months later, Gresham and his fellow soldiers sailed to France as part of the American Expeditionary Force, again under the command of Pershing. Part of Company F, 16th Infantry, First Division, Gresham was briefly in Paris followed by a few weeks of training in trench warfare, including the perils of machine guns and gas attacks.
During this period, Gresham and his mother wrote to each other. On at least one occasion, he sent gifts of silk handkerchiefs that he asked also to be given to his stepfather and to his girlfriend in Arkansas.
On October 20, 1917, Gresham, who had been promoted to corporal in charge of two squads, arrived at the front lines in northeastern France near Artois. Two weeks later, in the early morning hours of Saturday, November 3, 1917, he, and fellow soldiers, were on duty protecting the American trench lines against the Germans. According to some accounts, Gresham remained on duty that morning to relieve a soldier who complained of cold feet.
It was in these pre-dawn hours, around 3 am, that enemy troops infiltrated American trenches catching the troops unaware. Later accounts stated that in the darkness, Gresham, and others, did not recognize the incoming troops as Germans and that Gresham said, “Don’t shoot, I’m an American”. He was shot between the eyes and died instantly. Subsequently, Merle Hay of Iowa and Tom Glidden of Pennsylvania, were killed as the three become the initial American combat fatalities of World War I with Gresham often recognized as the first.
Two days later, on November 5, 1917, Gresham’s mother, Alice Dodd, received word of her son’s death at her home on Lemke Avenue. She was inconsolable saying “God help me” and “Oh, will they bring him home? I want to see my boy again.” She went on to say: “Yes, he is a hero. And for his sake I ought to be brave, but I’m not a hero. I’m just a mother, and my boy is dead.”
In France, Gresham, Enright, and Hay were eulogized by the French and buried near where they fell and later in an American military cemetery where Gresham’s body remained for the next four years.
On Sunday, November 11, 1917, a memorial service was held for Gresham at the Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Coliseum in Evansville—a date that coincidentally marked the end the of the war in 1918, later became Memorial Day, and followed Gresham’s mother’s birthday by one day. Mayor Benjamin Bosse organized the service and 5,000 Evansvillian’s joined the black-clad Mrs. Dodd in remembering her son. Reverend Frank Lenig of Simpson Methodist Episcopal Church opened the service with an invocation and former mayor and then postmaster John J. Nolan eulogized Evansville’s fallen son.
In the period following Gresham’s death, his mother received hundreds of sympathy letters from across the country, and her son was posthumously awarded the U. S. Silver Star and Purple Heart and the French War Cross or Croix de Guerre. To support the financially struggling Mrs. Dodd, The Evansville Courier newspaper led a successful effort to build a house for her to use during her lifetime, a house that still stands in Evansville’s Garvin Park. Nationally, Gresham, Enright, and Hay were remembered in poems and songs and their likenesses were used to promote the sale of U. S. War Bonds.
Tragedy continued to haunt Mrs. Dodd in 1918. On October 31 during the Flu Pandemic that swept the globe, her son John Gresham died at age 35. He left behind a widow and four small children, the youngest of whom was two-and-a-half weeks old. The following Sunday, November 3, Mrs. Dodd, the city, and the country marked the first anniversary of James Bethel Gresham’s death. In a cruel and ironic twist of fate, it was also the day her 31-year-old daughter Nola Lowey succumbed during the pandemic. In one year, one mother lost three adult children.
Three years later, in 1921, Gresham’s body, along with thousands of bodies of American servicemen, was returned to the United States. When his body arrived at Hoboken New Jersey in July, General Pershing laid a wreath at his coffin and those of Enright and Hay. Gresham’s body was then moved to Indianapolis, Indiana, where it lay in state in the rotunda of the State Capitol for two days.
It was on July 14, 1921, that James Bethel Gresham’ body arrived aboard a Chicago & Eastern Illinois Railroad car. The following day with the temperature reaching 94 degrees, 20,000 people paid their respects to Gresham as they passed by his coffin at the Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Coliseum. At 7 pm that evening, military personnel escorted his body to the Gresham Memorial Home in Garvin Park where his mother and stepfather resided in Garvin Park.
On Saturday, July 16, 1921, final respects were paid to Gresham. That morning a short, private service was held in the home—a home that included a laurel sent by President Warren Harding and his wife Florence. This was followed by a funeral service at Simpson Methodist Episcopal Church on Evansville’s west side. In withering heat of 93 degrees, Reverend Frank Lenig eulogized Gresham who lay in a flag-draped coffin before a congregation that overflowed into the street.
Throughout the day, people also stood on city thoroughfares to show their respect as Gresham’s body passed by, including on its journey north to Locust Hill Cemetery for final interment. Here, with the American Legion Funkhouser Post providing full military honors, taps were played, and guns saluted as a young man’s body that fell on foreign soil nearly four years earlier was lowered into the ground. The Evansville Courier reported that his brother Wynn burst into tears and that his mother broke down as her son James made his last journey at 4 pm on this hot and steamy Saturday afternoon.
Though there was discussion of building a memorial to honor Gresham, for over three years only a glass jar with a note written by his mother marked his grave among the military stones in Locust Hill Cemetery. Finally, on Christmas Day 1925, Locust Hill sexton Charles Kirkpatrick set the first of three stones that have marked his final resting place. A larger tribute was not realized until decades later when the James Bethel Gresham Chapter 7 of Disabled American Veterans placed a flagpole and plaque in the cemetery. An additional commemorative marker was installed at the Gresham Home in Garvin Park in 2017; a house which now serves as part of a homeless veteran reintegration program.
Through the years, Gresham has also been remembered in other parts of the state and country. On November 11, 1932, at 11 am in Indianapolis, an impressive memorial was dedicated in Gresham’s memory. Built to hold Gresham’s body, the family, the local American Legion, and the Service Star Mothers desired that his remains stay in Evansville. As such, this edifice now stands as a cenotaph to his memory. In McLean County, Kentucky, where he was born, a memorial bridge stood from 1928-1999, and a historical marker was placed near his birthplace in 1964. In Van Buren, Arkansas, a stone marker memorializes Gresham, Enright, and Hay.
Shortly after the deaths of Gresham, Enright, and Hay, the French placed a monument to their memory where they were originally buried. Though the Germans destroyed this monument during World War II, it was replaced by the French in 1955. In June of 2018, an additional marker was erected by the French people marking the location where Gresham, Enright, and Hay died.
Months earlier, on the centennial of Gresham’s death on November 3, 2017, a ceremony in Locust Hill cemetery honored his memory. A representative of the French government, descendants of Gresham, military personal, and local dignitaries remembered his sacrifice, a sacrifice representative of the thousands who never returned from the battlefields of a conflict whose moniker the world continues to wish had been true, “The War to end all Wars”.
