Military History | Hospice de Montfaucon, Montfaucon-d'Argonne — Donated for Use as an Almshouse

The American Battle Monuments Commission's 1938 catalogue of American memorials in Europe enters the State of Ohio's at Montfaucon under Character as "Substantial stone building, donated for use as an almshouse," with 1929 as the date. Its road notes send motorists to the main square of the town and allow fifteen minutes for the detour.

Montfaucon-d'Argonne could not be rebuilt where it had stood. The old village occupied the butte, held as a fortified position and fought over in September 1918, and the French state ruled out reconstruction on the hill. A new village went up at the foot, about 650 metres away, on an alignment plan drawn by the Martineau practice of Poitiers. Local accounts of who paid for it name a Madrid charitable society, the commune of Palestro in Kabylie, the commune of Pont-l'Abbé, the Peñarroya mining company in Spain, and the American state of Ohio, which financed the Hospice de Montfaucon. The village wrote that list into its street plan: Rue d'Espagne, Rue d'Amérique, Place du Général Pershing.

Ohio's division had not taken the town. The commission records Montfaucon as lying in the 79th Division's zone of action and the hill as cleared by its troops, and the longer of Ohio's two panels, transcribed by American War Memorials Overseas, says as much: the 37th, largely the Ohio National Guard, aided "in bringing about the evacuation of the old village of Montfaucon, which was at that time located in the adjoining divisional zone of action."

The building was handed over on 29 September 1929, "dedicated to the people of France and to the care of the commune of Montfaucon." On the butte the commission kept the ground round its own monument "as far as practicable in its wartime state," and the ruins are still there. In the village below, HOSPICE de MONTFAVCON is cut into a panel on an outer wall at the south-east corner of the square, and that corner still carries a nursing home on the French health ministry's register.

📸 Cover: American Battle Monuments Commission, "American Armies and Battlefields in Europe" (1938), page 206, the plate captioned "Airplane Photograph of Montfaucon, Looking South, Taken During the War. Arrow indicates sketched-in position of Meuse-Argonne American Memorial" — a United States Government publication, public domain, scanned by the Internet Archive, cropped to the plate and rotated upright. Second image: the rebuilt village of Montfaucon-d'Argonne, photograph by Ketounette, 2021, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons — area view.