William A. Fenlason Square
Franklin, Merrimack County, New Hampshire
Marker Inscription
Private Machine Gun Co. 103rd Infantry 26th Division Wounded In Action July 22, 1918 Died Of Wounds Oct. 26, 1918.
The Story
This square in Franklin honors a young New Hampshire soldier who served with the Machine Gun Company of the 103rd Infantry, part of the 26th 'Yankee' Division — a New England National Guard division that was among the first American units sent to France in World War I. Wounded in action on July 22, 1918, during the summer when Allied and American forces launched the counteroffensives that finally turned the war, he lingered for three months before dying of his wounds that October, just weeks before the Armistice. Naming a public square for one local man was a common way American towns turned private grief into permanent civic memory after the Great War.
Why it matters
It marks the moment the United States stepped onto the world stage as a military power, and it shows how ordinary hometowns absorbed the enormous human cost of that first modern, mechanized war — one name, one square, at a time.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
When the United States entered the First World War in 1917, it did so with a small professional army and had to build a fighting force almost overnight. National Guard units from across the country were federalized and sent to train, and among the first to reach France was the 26th Division — the 'Yankee' Division — drawn from the New England states. For a mill town in New Hampshire, that meant local young men were among the earliest Americans to face the war on the Western Front.
By the summer of 1918, that front had become a grinding, mechanized ordeal unlike anything in American memory. This was war transformed by the machine gun, massed artillery, and the sheer scale of industrial armies — a war that consumed men in numbers the country had never had to absorb from a foreign conflict.
Against that backdrop, a New England town sent its sons into the deadliest fighting of the age. The square that carries this soldier's name is where the town chose to keep the memory of what that cost — one household's share of a global catastrophe, set permanently into the map of home.
People & events
The marker honors William A. Fenlason, a private in the Machine Gun Company of the 103rd Infantry, part of that 26th 'Yankee' Division. The inscription gives the hard facts without ornament: wounded in action on July 22, 1918, and dead of those wounds on October 26 — a span of just over three months between the two dates.
Those dates carry a quiet weight. Late July 1918 was the season of the great Allied and American counteroffensives, the turning of the war after years of stalemate — the very fighting that would, within months, force the enemy back and toward an armistice. He was wounded in the thick of that turning tide.
And then the long, cruel interval. He did not fall on the field; he lingered, and died of his wounds in late October — with the Armistice of November 11 only weeks away. To be lost so close to the end is its own particular kind of grief, and the town felt it keenly enough to answer with something permanent: not a line in a ledger, but a public square that would carry his name as long as the town stood.
Its place in the American story
Fenlason's story is a single thread in one of the largest events in modern history — the moment the United States stepped onto the world stage as a military power. American troops arrived late but decisively, and units like the Yankee Division helped tip the balance in 1918. Behind that grand strategic fact stood hundreds of thousands of individual young men, most of them, like him, ordinary citizens called up from ordinary towns.
The war's human cost was staggering and, for America, newly industrial in scale. The machine gun he served made sure of that. His wound and slow death are a small, exact measure of what the new mechanized warfare did to the bodies of the men sent into it.
Naming a public square for one local soldier was how countless American towns answered that scale — by refusing to let it stay abstract. A nation can mourn a number; a town mourns a name. This square is part of a vast, decentralized act of remembrance that followed the Great War, in which each community translated its share of the loss into a place its neighbors would pass every day.
If you visit
Come read the inscription slowly, because it rewards attention. Notice the two dates and the distance between them — July to October, wounded to died. That gap tells the human story more plainly than any monument could: not an instant, but a long, hard fight to survive that he ultimately lost.
Take in the setting. A memorial square folds remembrance into the ordinary life of a town — the corner, the traffic, the passing errands. Standing there, you're standing where daily life and permanent memory share the same ground, which is exactly what the town intended when it gave the place his name.
If you're traveling through this part of New Hampshire, let this be the stop that connects the huge, distant history of the First World War to one street corner and one young man. It asks very little of you — a few minutes, a name read aloud in your mind — and it gives back the kind of understanding that no textbook page delivers as well as a place can.
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
- · William A. Fenlason
Related events
- · World War I
- · Second Battle of the Marne (1918)
Themes & tags
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