The papers came to Chris Jennings in a packet of documents after his father died four years ago. Among them were letters his father had sent the Army, starting in 2009, asking that Pvt. Willard M. Jennings be recognized for the wounds that killed him in Italy on Oct. 12, 1944. The first answer, Jennings said, was that the records had been lost in a fire.
On Friday in Abbot Hall, under Archibald Willard’s painting “The Spirit of ’76,” the family received the Purple Heart. The certificate, signed by the secretary of the Army and the adjutant general and dated Sept. 1, 2026, awards the medal “for wounds received in action resulting in his death.”
“It’s something that started many, many years ago,” Jennings told the small crowd around the Select Board’s table. “It’s nice to see this finally happening.”
A miner from a vanished town
Willard Jennings was 28 when he was killed, his grandson said before the ceremony. He had mined lead and zinc in Picher, Oklahoma, “a town that no longer exists,” and worked at the Oklahoma Ordnance Works before he entered the Army. He left a wife and a 3-year-old son, Larry Dean,…