Alvin York State Park has completed a restoration of the Honeymoon Cottage, which will reopen as an office for park rangers next to the Visitor Center.
Park Ranger Tanner Wells said the house was originally owned by Alvin York’s oldest son and was last lived in in 1980. Since then, Wells said the house had become dilapidated, and restoring it was the first step and preserving the park’s history. Rangers worked together to level the building, build a new porch and restore the roof and historic windows.
“For us, it was a learning experience, but also breathing life into an old building that had been here kind of forgotten for a long time and giving it new purpose and new life,” Wells said.
Wells said the restoration preserved 85 percent of the home’s original structure and is complete with electricity, landlines, heating and cooling and WiFi. True to its original form, the house does not include indoor plumbing, according to Wells. The cottage will serve as home to the park’s administrators as it was originally intended per a 1988 prospectus.
A penciled autograph on one of the house’s studs links the home to one Mitchel Cornelius Frogge, the original carpenter from 1941.
“We’re a bunch of historians here, so for us, any old building we can save it is a win in our book because there’s a lot of things that had been here in the past that have essentially either were torn down over time, over the lifetime of family and farmers, as well as during the tenure of parks in this area,” Wells said. “And then so you’re losing these old structures, which everything has a story to it, you know, so when you lose a structure, you’re going to lose the stories connected to it.”
Located on the Wolf River, the park was originally a farm and gristmill owned by WWI veteran Alvin York. Wells said they plan on restoring several other buildings on the park’s ground, starting with the old Bible School, an abandoned stone schoolhouse on the southern edge of the park.
“I came to this park back in 2016, and it was in disrepair,” Wells said. “It was in poor shape, had actually been moved onto a demolition list at one point. And then we worked to get it off and then went through the effort to get grants and the like to restore the old building. Park Manager Nathaniel Dotson led the charge, and he’s done a phenomenal job getting us to where we are now.”
Wells said the Honeymoon House is just one of some half dozen historic homes that make up the fabric of the Valley of the Three Forks of the Wolf. Wells said the park and its rangers do everything in their power to preserve the history and the legacy of the place the York family once called home.
