Audie Murphy: Hometown Hero

America's most decorated soldier of World War II was a Hunt County farm boy. Audie Murphy was born on a cotton farm near Kingston, north of Greenville, in 1925, the son of poor sharecroppers; he enlisted at the Greenville post office on his eighteenth birthday and came home with the Medal of Honor and two dozen citations for valor, then turned movie star. This driving loop links the country that made him to the wartime landscape of the county at large — his birthplace near Kingston, the cotton museum that tells the blackland story he was born into, and the WWII-era airfields and athletic field named for another local soldier, Lt. Truett Majors. It traces a path from sharecropper's cotton rows to global fame, across the same farm-and-railroad county that sent so many of its young men off to the war.