The first chapter in Forrest Pogue’s four-volume biography of General George Marshall, who was the “organizer” of America’s victory in World War II, is titled “The Marshalls of Uniontown.” George Marshall was born in that small southwestern Pennsylvania town on Dec. 31, 1880, in a two-story brick house at 130 West Main Street.
Uniontown originated as a way station on the National Road across the Allegheny Mountains in 1776. Pogue described Marshall’s childhood home in 1880 as “the last house on the west [end of town] before Main Street crossed over an ornamental stone bridge over . . . Coal Lick Run,” which ran behind the Marshalls’ house. Marshall was described as “quiet, shy, and . . . unusually serious” for a young boy. He loved history. His father showed him the site of Fort Necessity, also located in southwestern Pennsylvania, where Col. George Washington fought the first battle of the French and Indian War in July 1754. George and his friends would pretend to fight naval battles with “ships” they built with matchstick masts on Coal Lick Run.
Uniontown was a coal town. Marshall’s father had made some bad investments and the family lived in what Pogue calls “comparative poverty.” Marshall had regular chores as a boy, including cleaning the barn, hauling hay shocks, and distributing manure. George Marshall’s character was shaped by the 17 years he spent in Uniontown, which “like most American small towns, admired work and thought idleness in young or old a temptation to the devil.” He often rode his bicycle to nearby towns such as Brownsville on the Monongahela River, and he and his friends sometime brought their bikes on riverboats and traveled to New Geneva. Uniontown’s values included thrift, self-reliance, and a strict moral code. Marshall’s most recent biographer David Roll in George Marshall: Defender of the Republic, notes that throughout his great career of service to his country, Marshall “lived by a moral code that emphasized self-control, perseverance, integrity, truth, honor and duty,” and those character traits were instilled in Uniontown.
'Greatest American of 20th Century'
George Washington was Marshall’s hero, and Washington shared with Marshall many of those same virtues. Marshall’s character was further refined at the Virginia Military Institute and the United States Army where he became a sought-after staffer in World War I and the organizer of victory in World War II. After the war, Marshall served as Secretary of State (the Marshall Plan is named after him) and Secretary of Defense in the early years of the Cold War. George Will called Marshall the greatest American of the 20th century. And he is one of Pennsylvania’s greatest native sons.
Roll’s new biography is a good place to start for a new generation to learn about George Marshall’s life and career. But to fully understand Marshall’s greatness, you need to read Pogue’s four-volume biography.
The values and virtues that shaped Marshall can be traced to that small southwestern Pennsylvania town. Today, at the site of George Marshall’s birthplace and childhood home in Uniontown is the George C. Marshall Memorial Plaza, which includes displays that highlight aspects of Marshall’s career, statues and photographs of the general, and a scenic look over Coal Lick Run.
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