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Progressive & Modern Era

Captain Clinton E. Fisk Memorial Park

Jersey City, Hudson County, New Jersey

Marker Inscription

Captain Clinton E. Fisk Memorial Park dedicated in honor of Capt. Clinton E. Fisk born April 13,1882 in Jersey City who served with Co. "D" 107 Reg. 27th Division United States Army. Killed in action at St. Souplet, France October 18, 1918. ...

The Story

This memorial park honors Captain Clinton E. Fisk, a Jersey City native born in 1882 who served with Company D, 107th Regiment of the U.S. Army's 27th Division and was killed in action at St. Souplet, France, on October 18, 1918. The 27th Division fought in the final Allied offensives of World War I, including the breaking of the Hindenburg Line, in the war's last weeks. Dedicating a neighborhood park in his name turned a shared public space into a permanent local tribute.

Why it matters

It connects a single Jersey City family's loss to America's costly entry into World War I in its closing weeks, when the U.S. Army came of age on the Western Front.

The story behind this marker

AI context

The era

By the time the United States entered the World War in the spring of 1917, Jersey City was a dense, hardworking harbor town on the western edge of New York Harbor — a place of railyards, docks, and immigrant neighborhoods where young men grew up within sight of the ships that would carry the nation's soldiers to Europe. The man honored here, Clinton E. Fisk, was born in the city in 1882, so he came of age in that turn-of-the-century world of industrial growth and civic pride.

America came late to the war and had to build a modern army almost overnight. Millions of men were drafted, trained in hastily raised camps, and shipped across the Atlantic to a Western Front that had already been grinding through trench warfare for three brutal years. Fisk went as an officer, a captain in Company D, and by the autumn of 1918 he was in the thick of the final campaigns.

That autumn was the war's climax. The great German defensive network known as the Hindenburg Line was being broken by combined Allied assaults, and American units were increasingly central to the effort. It was in those last weeks, so close to the war's end, that this Jersey City man was killed.

People & events

The story here belongs to one man, and the marker gives us his outline with quiet precision. Clinton E. Fisk was born in Jersey City in April 1882. He served with Company D of the 107th Regiment, part of the U.S. Army's 27th Division, and he held the rank of captain — meaning he led men, and carried responsibility for their lives as well as his own.

He was killed in action at St. Souplet, in France, on October 18, 1918. That date matters. The armistice that ended the fighting came less than a month later, on November 11. Fisk died in the final, desperate push, when the outcome of the war was no longer in doubt but the killing had not yet stopped — one of countless men lost in the very shadow of peace.

What we should not do is invent the details the marker does not give: the particular action that took his life, the men beside him, his last hours. The record preserved here is a name, a unit, a place, and a date. Honored in stone and in the name of a park, that spare record was enough for his neighbors to build a lasting memory around.

Its place in the American story

The 27th Division, in which Fisk served, was among the American units that helped break through the strongest German fortifications in the closing weeks of the war. Fisk's death near St. Souplet places him within one of the most consequential chapters of the American war effort — the moment when the U.S. Army, newly arrived and enormous, threw its weight into the final Allied offensives and helped force Germany to the armistice table.

But the deeper national significance is smaller and more human. Across the United States after 1918, thousands of towns and neighborhoods reckoned with the loss of local sons in a war fought an ocean away. A single captain from Jersey City stands for a generation of Americans who left familiar streets and never came home.

Dedicating a park — a place of ordinary daily life — to one fallen officer was a distinctly American way of remembering. It refused to let the loss become an abstraction. Instead it wove his name into the everyday geography of the city he came from.

If you visit

This is a neighborhood memorial park, not a grand national monument, and that is exactly its power. Come expecting a green civic space in the heart of Jersey City rather than a museum — the kind of place where the memory of one man is folded into the routines of the living.

Look for the dedication itself, which lays out the essential facts: Fisk's birth in the city in 1882, his unit, and the place and date of his death in France in 1918. Reading those lines on site, with the sounds of the neighborhood around you, does something a page cannot — it reconnects a distant war to a specific American street corner.

If you're building a road trip around Hudson County's layered harbor history, this makes a short, reflective stop. Give it a few quiet minutes. A park named for a man killed weeks before the guns fell silent asks only that you remember why it carries his name.

Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.

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Related people

  • · Capt. Clinton E. Fisk

Related events

  • · World War I
  • · Battle at St. Souplet, France (1918)

Themes & tags

World War IMonument

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