05/03/2026
As I work on the closing chapter of Reverend Hardin, I wanted to bring to you the story of a man about whom I've been wanting to write for a while. A World War I hero, he's buried close to the main road of Sunset Hills. While you wait patiently for the final installment of Reverent Hardin, I am please to bring to you the story of Lewis "Lick" Martin.
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Close to the flagpole at Sunset Hills Cemetery, at the base of a hill along the road that exits the grounds, stands the gravestone of Lewis Martin. It is a military headstone, denoting a man whose World War I service belonged to the 369th Infantry Regiment of the 93rd Division—a unit known as the Harlem Hellfighters, and perhaps the most decorated Black American combat unit of the war.
Who was Lewis Martin? How did he come to serve in a unit associated with a state in the Northeast? How did he come to rest in Boonville?
The simple—and perhaps surprising—answer is that he was a native of Boonville.
Born in either 1887 or 1888, little is known of his early life until the census of 1900. At that time, he appears in a household led by his mother, Lou Martin, a forty-year-old woman born around 1859. The details of that household reflect the instability that often followed emancipation. Lou could not identify the states of birth for either of her parents, nor could she provide the months of birth for her children. She was widowed, renting her home, and working as a washerwoman—a job that required long hours for very little pay.
Her household was one of necessity.
Her oldest son, Henry, born in 1874, was already an adult. He was listed as divorced, literate, and employed as a servant—contributing to the family’s income. A daughter, aged fourteen, was attending school and could read and write. Louis, at twelve, was not literate and was already at work as a servant, his education apparently sacrificed to help sustain the household. The youngest child, Nellie, age ten, remained at home and was also illiterate.
The census noted that Lou had given birth to five children, all of whom were living. Yet only four appear in the household. The fifth had likely already left—married, working, or otherwise beyond the reach of that enumeration. For now, that absence remains unresolved.
It was a household shaped by labor and survival for the provision of stability. And yet, sometime in the first decade of the twentieth century, something changed. Lewis Martin learned to read and write.
And he married.
On August 21, 1909, Lewis Martin married Julia Crittenden in Boonville. The marriage was one of several performed in a short span of time by Rev. Moore of the Second Baptist Church on Morgan Street—part of an effort to formalize relationships that had long existed outside the bounds of law. It suggests that Lewis and Julia were not beginning something new, but rather giving legal (and moral according to Reverend Moore) shape to something already established.
By 1910, Lewis was living in the household of his father-in-law, John Crittenden, a widower. The home was located in East Boonville, along the waterfront—a part of town far more segregated than the Locust Street neighborhood of his childhood. There, within a predominantly Black community, Lewis occupied a different social space. He was no longer a child laborer. He was a husband, a wage earner, and, now, a literate man. He worked as a laborer cleaning the city streets. His wages were the only financial means for his household as neither his 74 year old father-in-law, his wife, or his 11 year old brother-in-law are listed as having occupations. Though not the head of the household in name, he was acting as such in providing the support for the family.
No real trace of Lewis Martin finds its way into the newspapers or the public record from until 1917. By then United States had entered the First World War, and Lewis Martin entered the Army. He would serve in Company D of the 369th Infantry Regiment, part of the 93rd Division—a unit composed of Black soldiers, many of whom would fight under French command.
In the spring of 1918, he left the United States as part of a replacement draft detachment organized at Camp Funston, passing through the Port of Embarkation at Hoboken, New Jersey. Within days of arriving in France, he was sent to the front.
A newspaper account written in March of 1919, shortly after his return home, offers the earliest description of his service. It places him on the Champagne front, serving in a machine gun company and carrying one of the French automatic weapons used by the regiment. The account describes a soldier moving forward through trenches and into No Man’s Land, engaging German forces and returning with prisoners. It also notes that he had received the French Croix de Guerre for bravery.
More than a decade later, at the time of his death in 1931, a second version of that story appeared in print. It was more detailed—more personal. In that telling, Lewis Martin, known locally as “Lick,” had fallen into trouble while in camp. Sent forward as punishment, he was placed in a dangerous outpost at the front. There, under bombardment, he carried messages between units. At one point, he encountered a German machine gun position. Rather than retreat, he advanced. When the encounter was over, several Germans lay dead, and others had surrendered. He returned to his lines with prisoners ahead of him.
The details of that account—like many stories told after the fact—may have grown in the telling. But its core does not stand alone. It rests on what was already being said in 1919: that Lewis Martin had faced the enemy under fire, and that he had distinguished himself in doing so.
Both accounts agree on one point. He was a soldier who had gone forward and come back.
He returned to the United States in February of 1919, landing in New York after departing from Brest, France. Within weeks, he was back in Boonville. And there, the life he resumed bore little resemblance to the one he had briefly built a decade earlier.
By 1920, Lewis Martin was once again living in his mother’s household, now on Fourth Street. His marriage had ended. The census record—though inconsistently transcribed—appears to mark him as divorced. No children are recorded. We do not know when the marriage ended. We do not know why. Only that it had. He was working as a laborer in an ice cream factory, earning wages in the same town in which he had been born, raised, and—despite everything—had remained.
In January of 1931, the household changed once more. His mother, Lou Martin - “Aunt Lou” to those who knew her - died at her home on Elm Street. She had lived a long life, one that stretched from slavery into the twentieth century, raising her children through labor and persistence. It was the first of two major blows to the family. Six weeks later, Lewis followed.
The World War I veteran died on February 20, 1931, at approximately forty-two years of age. The cause was pneumonia and influenza. At the time of his death, local newspapers noted that he was a World War I veteran and that he “held one of the highest honors a soldier was able to earn—the Croix de Guerre.”
Plans were considered for a military burial. But they could not be carried out. The local post of the American Legion, lacking rifles and ammunition, was unable to provide the full honors typically afforded to a soldier. The man who had crossed an ocean, who had stood in the trenches of France, and who had been remembered—at least in print—for acts of bravery under fire, was buried without them.
For a time, even that memory faded.
In 1938, seven years after his death, an application was submitted for a government-issued headstone. It came not from an official body, but from his sister, Mary McFadden. Through that act, his service was formally acknowledged, and a marker was placed at his grave.
Today, that stone stands at Sunset Hills Cemetery where it marks a soldier of the 369th Infantry and a veteran of the Great War. But it does not tell the whole of his life.
It does not tell of a boy who could not read, or of a mother who worked to hold a household together. It does not tell of the brief stability he found—and the loss that followed. It does not tell of a man who moved between different worlds, never leaving the same town. It marks where he lies...but not the distance he traveled to get there.
The details of his life can never completely be filled in, but his story is amazing nonetheless...and I am happy that I was able to share it with you.
Thanks for reading,
Eric, M2 Historian
