Lipscomb University to unveil historical marker at Lawrenceburg WWII German POW site at ceremony May 12
Kim Chaudoin | 615.966.6494 |
Lipscomb University will unveil Tennessee’s newest historical marker in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, on the site of a World War II German prisoner of war camp on Thursday, May 12.
The ceremony will take place at Providence Banquet Hall, located at 26 Public Square in Lawrenceburg, about 80 miles south of Nashville. A reception begins at 4 p.m. with the unveiling set for 5 p.m. The ceremony is free and open to the public.
During World War II, from April 1944 to March 1946, a German prisoner of war camp was located in Lawrenceburg. After the war and over the next 30 years, the Germans who were held at the camp and returned to their homeland continued to write letters to their American friends in Lawrenceburg. This collection, the Stribling Brock Letters Collection, was given to Lipscomb University in 2015 by Curtis Peters, president of the Lawrenceburg Historical Society.
The collection, which includes nearly 350 letters, photos and other items, is part of the Lipscomb University Beaman Library special collections program. Last summer, Charles McVey, professor of German at Lipscomb, and university students began work on cataloging and translating the letters.
The POW camp in Lawrenceburg housed 300 or so prisoners, who were contracted out to local farms as day laborers. Many of them got to know the locals quite well. When the war ended and the POWs went home to Germany, they wrote letters to their American friends.
One Lawrenceburg family, the Brocks, kept the letters, and in the 1980s, Lynn Pettus, a descendant of the Brock family, found more than 350 letters stuffed in a Corn Flakes box. Peters, an in-law in the Brock family, kept the letters and made presentations on them for many years.
Then last year, Peters learned of Lipscomb University through a personal connection with one of Lipscomb’s history professors and decided to donate the letters to the Beaman Library archives. The family wanted the Stribling Brock letters collection to be housed at a faith-based university and to be available for the public to enjoy and for researchers to advance knowledge of this aspect of Tennessee history.
The donation of the letters to Lipscomb sparked new national interest in a forgotten chapter of Tennessee’s and America’s history this summer and resulted in nationwide media coverage as well as media stories in Europe. The collection was featured on NBC Nightly News on Sunday, Aug. 9, 2015. To view the story, click here.
For more information contact Elizabeth Rivera, Beaman Library special collections librarian, at Elizabeth.rivera [at] lipscomb.edu.