Cornelia Clark Fort

Fort came from a prominent Nashville family; her father, Rufus Elijah Fort, was a founder of National Life and Accident Insurance Company. He made her three older brothers promise never to fly, but not her. She became the second woman in Tennessee to hold a commercial license and the first to hold an instructor's license. In Hawaii she taught for the Andrew Flying Service at John Rodgers Field. In 1942 she became the second woman to join the ferrying squadron that grew into the WASP.

What the plaque says

(February 5, 1919 - March 21, 1943) Born into an affluent Tennessee family, Cornelia Fort attended the Ward-Belmont School in Nashville and graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in New York in 1939. She returned to a society life in Tennessee but was soon introduced to flying by a friend. In her first week in the air, Fort logged over 2,000 miles. She became an instructor in 1941, a year after her first flying lesson. She worked with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's civilian pilot training program at Fort Collins, Colorado, before taking a similar position in Hawaii. She was airborne with a trainee when Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor; Fort landed safely while under enemy fire. By 1942 she was part of the Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS) commanded by Nancy Harkness Love. Fort and 26 other women pilots ferried war planes across the United States. Fort was transferred to a new squadron in Long Beach, California. On March 21, 1943, she ferried a BT-13A airplane toward Dallas' Love Field. While flying in formation, her plane struck another aircraft. Available records indicate that Fort was the first American woman pilot to die on active military duty when she plunged into the rugged terrain of Mulberry Canyon, three miles southeast of this site. Shortly before her death at age 24, Cornelia wrote, "I am grateful that my one talent, flying, was useful to my country." On August 4, 1943, WAFS personnel merged with and helped create the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP), led by noted aviator Jacqueline Cochran. The WASP's most famous training ground was Avenger Field at Sweetwater in nearby Nolan County. (2000)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Abilene State Park — 15 mi
  A pecan-shaded park on Elm Creek in the Callahan Divide south of Abilene, with red sandstone CCC buildings, a summer pool, a bird blind and yurts under the trees.
• Buffalo Gap Historic Village — 16 mi
  The 1880 stone courthouse and jail of the county seat Abilene took away, with about twenty old buildings from around West Texas gathered around it since 1956.
• Pioneer Museum — 20 mi
  Nolan County's settlement story in a dozen rooms of Judge R. A. Ragland's 1906 house in Sweetwater, a town that started as a dugout store for buffalo hunters and a post office called Blue Goose.
• Frontier Texas! — 20 mi
  Abilene's multimedia museum of the frontier as the settlers told it, beside the Texas and Pacific tracks the town was built on, and the official visitor center for the Texas Forts Trail.

More markers nearby

• Mulberry Canyon — steps away
• Castle Peak — 5.7 mi
• Mountain Pass Station — 5.8 mi
• Near Site of Indian Battle — 5.8 mi