The War to End All Wars ended at the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918. Days later, 54-year-old Illinois State Normal University (ISNU) Professor Elmer Cavins applied to join the YMCA with the intent of serving the American Expeditionary Forces—the United States’ armed forces in Europe—during the chaotic months of demobilization.

He soon received notice that he was to be deployed to France and left Normal for New York City on January 2, 1919. From there Cavins crossed the Atlantic on a steamer ship bound for England, then made his way to Beaune, France, where he assumed an administrative position within the College of Correspondence at the newly-formed American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) University. Staffed entirely by volunteers, the university enrolled over 10,000 soldier-students during its four months of operation, teaching everything from basic literacy skills to animal husbandry, business law, and “applied electricity for the practical man.”  

Cavins wrote home 69 times during his service with the AEF University and subsequent travels through war-torn Europe. He also saved postcards and documents relating to the university, which provide valuable context to his words, as well as 23 letters from a 1911 trip through Europe as a tourist and select materials from his work at ISNU both as a student and professor.

Milner Library’s Digitization Center prioritized Cavins’ papers for digitization after concluding a multiyear project to scan, describe, contextualize, and visualize the World War I ISNU Service Records assembled by Illinois State’s first librarian, Ange Milner. In contrast to that digital collection, which provides a high-level overview of the University’s participation in World War I, these documents paint a portrait of Cavins as a family man and faculty member while granting the researcher a deep dive into one person’s experiences of this seminal period in world history.