Individual Details

Death

Death of Paul Furr Has Been Confirmed
As announced In the News last week, letters that had been addressed to Private Paul Stuart Furr, with the American Expeditionary Forces in France, were returned here last week marked “Deceased” and signed “Chaplain”. It was some time before any definite information could be gotten from the War Department, but on Monday the following telegram was received by the boy’s mother:

Washington, D. C., Oct. 7, 1918.
Mrs. Stuart J. Furr, Strasburg, Va.
Deeply regret to inform you that it is officially reported that Private Paul Stuart Furr, Field Artillery, died of lobar pneumonia on September 6th.
Harris, Acting for the Adjutant General.

Young Furr entered the Service in July 1917, enlisting with the Norfolk Blues at Norfolk, Va. He had reached the age of 22 in January, and was a young man who held the respect and esteem of many friends. Surviving the deceased are his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Stuart J. Furr of this place; one sister, Maude M., and one brother, Frank L. at home; one half-sister, Mrs. Nannie G. Conner of Chattanooga, Tenn.; and three half-brothers, William C. Furr of Washington, Earl W. of Cumberland, and Loy C. of Cumberland, Md.
Strasburg News, Strasburg, Virginia, October 10, 1918

COUNTY DEAD RETURNS FROM FRANCE - Paul Furr, Who Died in the Service Over-Seas, Returns to Rest in His Native Land, dated 22 September 1920.
Back to the land of their birth, back from the sacred ground of France upon which they died they are returning, sons of America, members of the Golden Legion who died that all men might be free. Each week the great gray transports arrive at American ports bearing their load of America's sacred dead back to their native land. They are coming back at last, the "buddies" who were left behind when the great hosts of olive drab sailed so joyfully for home.
And so has the body of Paul Stewart Furr, an American soldier, and a son of Shenandoah County been returned to America. Mr. Stewart Furr of Strasburg, Va., received a communication from the government the latter part of the week stating that the body of his son had arrived in New York and would be shipped to Strasburg at the earliest possible date. Furr will be the first American soldier who died over-seas to be returned to Shenandoah County. The body upon its arrival at Strasburg will be conveyed to the Harrisville cemetery, near Toms Brook, and there interred.
As Paul Furr is one of the first of Shenandoah County dead to return from over-seas, so was he one of the first to leave the county and to enlist in the service of this country. He enlisted in the Norfolk Blues, Light Artillery, in the month of April, 1917, at Norfolk. He was transferred to Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, soon after his enlistment and later to Anniston, Alabama. He sailed for France as a member of the 111th Field Artillery, Battery B, 29th Divison, in the month of July, 1918. He had been in France but a brief month before, as a result of the exposure and fatigue of the severe training, he contracted double pneumonia and after an illness of several days died at Base Hospital camp de Meucon, France.
His body was interred in the cemetery near the hospital and there it has rested 'neath its slender wooden cross marked by the little aluminum identification until its recent transfer to one of the great concentration cemeteries and still more recently to the transport which bore it to the United States.
Mr. Furr of Strasburg at the time of this writting was not able to say at just the exact time that the body would arrive in the county, but thought that it would be within a few days. And so even as Paul Stewart Furr has now come back "to the land of youth and freedom beyond the ocean of bars, where the air is full of stars", so too he will soon return to the particular county of that land in which he was born and will be given a final resting place in a quiet countryside, that he knew long ago in the days when he was a boy and when war and France were far off, things indeed.
And as he returns let it be remembered that he died a man and a soldier, and that to him is due all the honor that would always be accorded to him who pays that last price in serving his county and flag.