World War One Memorial
Jermyn, Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
CARL BAKER, FRANK KELLY, WM. J. GRIFFITHS, GEORGE R. MORGAN, THOMAS HARVEY, MAURICE L. PHILLIPS, RICHARD T. HENWOOD, JAMES, ROACH, JOSEPH HOUSTON, JOHN ZALECKI, DAVID S. JONES NICHOLAS E. SELGRATH "PEACE IS DEAR BUT MOTHER IS SORROWFUL" - Nov 11, 1918… transcription continues on the marker
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The Story
This memorial lists the sons of Jermyn who served in World War I, closing with the date of the Armistice — November 11, 1918 — and the mournful line "Peace is dear but Mother is sorrowful." Like countless American towns, this anthracite-country borough sent its young men to the trenches of France, and many did not return. The roll of names keeps their sacrifice before the community.
Why it matters
World War I memorials in small industrial towns capture the war's staggering local cost, when a single borough could lose a dozen of its own.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Jermyn lies in the anthracite coal country of northeastern Pennsylvania, in the valley that made Lackawanna County one of the engines of industrial America. In the early twentieth century, boroughs like this one ran on hard coal — mined by families that had come from Wales, Ireland, and across eastern and central Europe to work the deep seams beneath the hills.
The roll of names on this memorial reflects exactly that world. Read them together and you hear the mingled voices of the coalfields — Welsh, Irish, and Eastern European surnames side by side, the sons of immigrant miners and settled townsfolk alike.
When the United States entered the First World War in 1917, these tight industrial communities sent their young men in large numbers. A borough built on coal now sent its labor of a different kind — its sons — across the Atlantic to the trenches of France.
People & events
The heart of this marker is its list: Carl Baker, Frank Kelly, William J. Griffiths, George R. Morgan, and the others named alongside them. These were Jermyn's own — young men drawn from the same streets, mines, chapels, and clubs, now bound together forever on a single stone.
They served in a war of a terrible new kind: trench lines, machine guns, artillery, and gas, fought across the shattered ground of France and Belgium. American troops arrived in force in 1917 and 1918 and helped turn the final campaigns, but the cost was steep, and small towns felt every loss keenly.
The inscription closes with a date and a cry of grief. "Peace is dear but Mother is sorrowful," it reads, above November 11, 1918 — the day the Armistice fell silent over the Western Front. In a single line it holds both truths of that morning: relief that the guns had stopped, and the unhealed sorrow of the mothers whose sons would not return to fill the peace.
Its place in the American story
The First World War was America's first great modern overseas war, and it fell heavily on precisely these kinds of communities — industrial, immigrant-rich towns that supplied both the raw materials and the manpower of the war effort. The coal that heated the nation and powered its factories came from valleys like Jermyn's, and so did its soldiers.
The Armistice date carved here became one of the most sacred moments on the American calendar. November 11 was first marked as Armistice Day, honoring the fallen of that war, and later broadened into Veterans Day — so a small borough's memorial is anchored to a date the whole country still pauses to remember.
Above all, this marker captures the local arithmetic of a global catastrophe. A single borough could send a dozen of its own and mourn them together, and multiplied across thousands of towns, that grief became a nation's.
If you visit
Read the names slowly — that is what a memorial like this asks of you. Each one belonged to a family that walked these same streets, and the whole point of carving them in stone was so that strangers, a century on, would still speak them.
Linger on that closing line, "Peace is dear but Mother is sorrowful." It is a rare and moving choice for a war memorial, trading triumph for honesty. Standing before it, you feel the war not as strategy or victory but as a mother's empty chair.
Set in the old anthracite region, the marker pairs naturally with a wider look at coal-country history — the mines, the churches, and the immigrant communities that built these boroughs. It reminds you that the young men who left for France in 1917 came from a very particular American place, and that this place has never stopped remembering them.
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
- · Carl Baker
- · Frank Kelly
- · Wm. J. Griffiths
- · George R. Morgan
Related events
- · World War I
- · Armistice, November 11, 1918
Themes & tags
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