Sgt. Elbert L. Kinser

Kinser was a farm boy from Greeneville who enlisted in December 1942, trained at Parris Island, and sailed in March 1943 to American Samoa. He joined the First Marine Division in Melbourne, Australia, and fought through Cape Gloucester on New Britain and Peleliu in the Palau Islands before landing on Okinawa on Easter Sunday, April 1, 1945. He was killed on May 4. First buried in the division cemetery on Okinawa, his body came home in 1949. President Truman's Medal of Honor was presented to his parents in Greeneville on July 4, 1946.

What the plaque says

Sgt. Elbert L. Kinser For conspicuous gallantry as a leader of a First Marine Division Rifle Platoon on Okinawa Shima on May 4, 1945, this Greene County native was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously by President Harry S. Truman. Attacked by Japanese forces, Sgt. Kinser engaged the enemy in a fierce hand grenade battle. Quick to act when a grenade landed, he threw himself on it, absorbing the explosion, and saving his men at the expense of his own life. He is buried in the Solomon Lutheran Church Cemetery in Greene County.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Andrew Johnson National Historic Site — steps away
  The tailor shop, homestead and grave of the seventeenth president in Greeneville, where the people he enslaved are named and where the Eighth of August emancipation celebration took root.
• Rogersville Historic District — 19 mi
  Tennessee's first newspaper was printed in this Hawkins County seat in 1791, and Swift Memorial College, founded in 1883, educated Black students after the state's 1901 law forced Maryville College to expel them.
• Jonesborough Historic District — 22 mi
  Tennessee's oldest town, chartered in 1779, where Elihu Embree printed The Emancipator in 1820 and a hay wagon by the courthouse started the National Storytelling Festival in 1973.
• Unicoi County Heritage Museum and the Erwin Rail Yard — 25 mi
  A museum in the old fish hatchery superintendent's house in Erwin, a Clinchfield railroad town where the elephant Mary was hanged in 1916 and Black residents were driven out in 1918.

More markers nearby

• Greeneville Union Convention — steps away
• Death of John Morgan September 4, 1864 — steps away
• Benjamin Lundy — steps away
• Ellen "Nelly" VanVactor Free Black Female Landowner — steps away