Women Veterans Monuments at Veterans Park Map

Cathay Williams

A hero of the Civil War, Cathay Williams is the only documented African American woman who served as a soldier in the U.S. Army. 

Cathay Williams was born in Independence Missouri to an enslaved mother and a free father in September 1844. During her adolescence, she worked as a house slave. Union forces occupied Jefferson City during the early stages of the Civil War. Captured slaves were designated as contraband and were forced to serve in military support roles. Before her voluntary enlistment, at 17 years old, Williams served as an Army cook and washerwoman. Despite the prohibition against women serving in the military, Williams enlisted in the U.S. Army under the male alias "William Cathay" in November 1866.

Cathay said she joined the Army because she wanted to make her own living and not be dependent on relations or friends.

Williams served under the service of General Philip Sheridan and witnessed the Red River Campaign at the Battle of Pea Ridge. Shortly after her enlistment, Williams contracted smallpox and was hospitalized. Possibly due to the effects of smallpox, heat and years of marching, her body showed signs of strain. She was honorably discharged by her commanding officer, Captain Charles E. Clarke on October 14, 1868.

Williams is also the only known female Buffalo Soldier. Williams' determination to serve her country demonstrates the extraordinary feats women have accomplished simply trying to live their lives.

(September 1844-1893)

Lenah Higbee

A hero of World War I, Lenah Higbee is recognized as the first female recipient of the Navy Cross.

Born in Chatham, New Brunswick Canada on May 18, 1874, Higbee completed nurses' training at the New York Post-Graduate Hospital in 1899 and entered private practice shortly thereafter. She took postgraduate training at Fordham Hospital in New York in 1908. Lenah Higbee served in the U.S. Navy from 1908-1922. For eleven of her fourteen years of service, Higbee was superintendent of the Navy Corps. Facing continual stalwart resistance and institutionalized discrimination from the male dominated medical community, Higbee rose from her position as a rankless nurse paid considerably less than her male peers to become the second superintendent of the Navy Nurse Corps.

She grew the NNC from 160 to over 1300 nurses, served on multiple healthcare committees to prepare the Red Cross for the impacts of World War I, began training hospital corpsmen, and survived the Spanish flu epidemic. She also lobbied for expanded healthcare for military dependents, and formalized Navy nursing uniforms bearing the oak leaf and acorn over an anchor. Her efforts in shaping the NNC caused one paper to conclude “the most needed woman was the war nurse,” and defined her as “a soldier, fighting pain, disease and death with weapons of science and skill.”

In 1945, the Navy commissioned USS Higbee, the first combat warship to be named for a female member of the Navy.

Date of Death / January 10, 1941 (1874-1941)

Jacqueline Cochran

Jacqueline Cochran, a hero from World War II, became the first civilian woman to be awarded the Distinguished Service Medal and in 1945. She was commissioned a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force Reserve in 1948.

Born in Muscogee, Florida in 1906 as Bessie Lee Pitman, Jacqueline Cochran grew up in poverty and had little formal education. She moved to Georgia at the age of eight, to work in a cotton mill. Cochran married her husband at the age of fourteen, whom she divorced in 1927. A trained beautician, she pursued that career for several years and took her first flying lessons in 1932. She achieved her pilot's license in three weeks and mastered the technical aspects of aviation and navigation. Meanwhile, in 1935 she organized a successful cosmetics firm, which she sold in 1936.

In 1935 Cochran became the first woman to enter the Bendix Transcontinental Air Race. She came in third in 1937 and in 1938 she won the Bendix Trophy, flying a Seversky pursuit plane. In June 1941 she piloted a bomber to England. As a flight captain in the British Air Transport Auxiliary she trained a group of female pilots for war transport service. In June 1941, she piloted a bomber to England. As a flight captain in the British Air Transport Auxiliary, she trained a group of female pilots for war transport service. Upon her return to the United States, she supported a similar program for the Army Air Forces and in July 1943 was named director of the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP), which supplied more than a thousand auxiliary pilots for the armed forces. 

In 1953, eager to make the transition to jet aircraft, Cochran became the first woman to break the sound barrier, piloting an F86. American pilot from DeFuniak Springs who held more speed, distance, and altitude records than any other flyer during her career. In 1964 she flew an aircraft faster than any woman had before.

Date of Death / August 9, 1980 (1906-1980)

Jonita Ruth Bonham-Bovée

Jonita Ruth Bonham-Bovée, a hero of the Korean War, became the first woman to be awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.

Bonham was born on April 2, 1922, in Bennington, Oklahoma, and joined the Army Air Corps, where she was commissioned a 2nd Lieutenant in the Medical Corps. She served in the Philippines and Japan after World War II, and then returned to the United States, resigning from active military duty. When the Korean War broke out she rejoined the military, this time as a 1st Lieutenant in the United States Air Force. Bonham logged 245 flight hours and helped in the evacuation of over 600 wounded men.

On September 26, 1950, she was serving as a flight nurse with another nurse, Vera Brown, in a C54 cargo plane that had been converted into an emergency hospital. Bonham and Brown were two of three medical team members on the flight that day she learned that she was needed for an immediate evacuation flight. The weather was severe, but the medical crew, along with about 40 soldiers, boarded the Douglas C-54 Skymaster that was bound for Kimpo Air Base near Seoul, South Korea. The plan was to drop the soldiers off at the base and evacuate more wounded men. About a half-mile from shore the plane stalled, descended, and slammed into the Sea of Japan, breaking into three pieces and sinking.

Bonham, who was completely submerged in the aircraft, managed to fight her way to the surface, where she found herself swimming for her life in a sea churned up by high winds. She hung onto a floating barracks bag until she was able to grab a life raft rope. She stayed in the water, grabbing other survivors and guiding them to the rope. It was not until 17 of them were safe that she allowed herself to be pulled into one of two available rafts.

Once rescued, Bonham spent nine months in the hospital recovering from a broken cheekbone, skull fracture, broken shoulder and broken left wrist. She later became the first female recipient of the Distinguished Flying Cross and was promoted to Captain.

Date of Death / December 24, 1994 (1922-1994)

Sharon Ann Lane

A hero of the Vietnam War, Sharon Ann Lane was the only American nurse killed as a direct result of direct enemy fire in the Vietnam War.

Lane was born July 7, 1943, in Zanesville, Ohio. She graduated from Aultman Hospital School of Nursing in Canton in 1965, where she worked until May 1967, later attending Canton Business College.

She joined the U.S. Army Nurse Corps Reserve on April 18, 1968, and was sent to Vietnam a year later. She completed her training at Fort Sam Houston on June 14,1968, and reported for duty at the Army’s Fitzsimons General Hospital in Denver, Colorado, just 3 days later. She worked there until 24 April 1969, when she reported to Travis Air Force Base, California, with orders sending her to Vietnam. First Lt. Lane arrived at the 312th Evacuation Hospital at Chu Lai on April 29, 1969. She was originally assigned to the Intensive Care Unit but was reassigned to the Vietnamese Ward. This work was often physically and emotionally challenging, yet Lane repeatedly declined transfers to another ward. She worked five days a week, twelve hours a day in Ward 4, and spent her off-duty time taking care of the most critically injured American soldiers in the Surgical ICU.

On the morning of June 8, 1969, the 312th Evacuation Hospital was struck by a salvo of 122mm rockets fired by the Viet Cong. One rocket struck between Wards 4A and 4B, killing two people and wounding another 27. Among the dead was Lane, who died instantly of fragmentation wounds to the chest. A memorial service was held in Chu Lai 10 June 1969 and a Catholic mass followed the next day.

For her service in Vietnam, she was awarded the Purple Heart, the Bronze Star with “V” device, the National Defense Service Medal, the Vietnam Service Medal, the National Order of Vietnam Medal, and the Vietnamese Gallantry Cross (with Palm).

Date of Death / June 8, 1969 (1943-1969)

Leigh Ann Hester

A hero of the Gulf War, Leigh Ann Hester was the first female soldier to be awarded the Silver Star for valor since WWII. She and two other members of her unit were given the award for their actions during an enemy ambush on their convoy.

Sgt. Leigh Ann Hester was a vehicle commander in 2005 in the 617th Military Police Company, a National Guard unit out of Richmond, Kentucky. It was a job that meant guaranteed combat, something the Pentagon was not allowing women to officially engage in as an occupational specialty until 2013. “It was that one job where you can get out there and get dirty and be in an infantry-type environment,” she told the Tennessean newspaper in 2015.

Hester and her squad were shadowing a supply convoy on March 20, 2005, in Iraq when anti-Iraqi fighters ambushed the convoy. The squad moved to the side of the road, flanking the insurgents and cutting off their escape route. Hester led her team through the “kill zone” and into a flanking position, where she assaulted a trench line with grenades and M203 grenade launcher rounds.

She and Staff Sgt. Timothy Nein, her squad leader, then cleared two trenches, at which time she killed three insurgents with her rifle. When the fight was over, 27 insurgents were dead, six were wounded, and one was captured.

She later said being awarded the medal “really doesn’t have anything to do with being a female. It’s about the duties I performed that day as a soldier.”

Hester took a brief break from the National Guard in 2009, and worked as an officer for a civilian law enforcement agency in a Nashville, Tennessee suburb. However, she returned to the military a short while later, in late 2010.