Audie Murphy's Homecoming, June 15, 1945

The Examiner of June 21, 1945 described Lieutenant Murphy as a grinning, freckle-faced boy who had not changed a bit. He rode in beside Mayor R. B. Beaver behind a McKinney fire truck with sirens wailing, and a parade of more than twenty cars looped the square past sidewalks hung with flags. The warmest welcome came at a small frame house six blocks away, where he met his three sisters and little brother for the first time in three years. Combat, he said, was not as bad as it seemed in the midst of it.

What the plaque says

Audie Murphy's Homecoming, June 15, 1945 With Allied victory in World War II Europe secured, Farmersville celebrated the return of the area's most famous citizen soldier. On his 18th birthday, Audie Murphy enlisted in the U.S. Army at the Greenville Post Office. In more than two years of combat, he fought in North Africa, Sicily, Italy and France and earned every Army citation for valor, including the Congressional Medal of Honor. His homecoming drew an audience of several thousand to the town square. Life Magazine's July 16, 1945 issue made the Farmersville ceremony and Murphy's family reunion its cover story, commemorating the efforts of a grateful nation and hometown. (2008)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Heard Natural Science Museum & Wildlife Sanctuary — 15 mi
  A 289-acre sanctuary in McKinney that Bessie Heard founded at the age of 80, with five habitats, a 50-acre wetland and 6.5 miles of trails.
• Audie Murphy / American Cotton Museum — 16 mi
  A Greenville museum of Hunt County's military heroes, including Audie Murphy, and of cotton, which keeps the engine of what it says was the world's largest inland cotton compress.
• Rockwall County Historical Foundation & Museum — 17 mi
  A small museum in Harry Myers Park that keeps the evidence on Rockwall's rock wall, sandstone dikes that geologists call natural and folk tales call built.

More markers nearby

• Gussie Nell Davis — steps away
• First National Bank of Farmersville — steps away
• First Methodist Church of Farmersville — steps away
• Farmersville — 0.5 mi