Evelyn Sharp

Sharp's last flight was a ferry run. On April 3, 1944, she was delivering a twin-engine P-38 Lightning from Long Beach, California, to Newark, New Jersey, and had made several stops on the way. Taking off from New Cumberland Airport in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, she lost an engine and tried to put down in an open field; the pancake landing drove the landing gear into the cockpit. She was the only WASP killed in a P-38. The field, wooded now, is part of the Peiffer Memorial Arboretum, dedicated in 2018 with two memorials to her.

What the plaque says

Evelyn Sharp Evelyn Genevieve Sharp was Nebraska's best-known aviatrix during her eight-year career. She was the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. John E. Sharp and was born October 1, 1919, in Melstone, Montana. Her family moved to Ord in her youth. She became interested in flying at age fourteen, and she soloed under the tutelage of Jack Jefford at sixteen. Two years later she received her commercial pilot's license, one of the youngest persons to achieve this rating. Ord businessmen assisted in the purchase of her first airplane, and she repaid them with profits from barnstorming trips. At twenty Evelyn became an instructor. Over 350 men learned flying from her in Spearfish, South Dakota, her first teaching assignment. She was one of the nation's first female airmail pilots. With the coming of World War II, Evelyn joined General H.H. "Hap" Arnold's Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squad- ron, expert pilots who flew aircraft from factory sites to shipping points. Her proficiency enabled her to fly everything from training craft to bombers. On April 3, 1944, at the age of twenty-four, Evelyn Sharp was killed near Middleton, Pennsylvania, in the crash of a P-38 pursuit plane. At the time of her death she was a squadron commander only three flights from her fifth rating, the highest certificate then available to women. She is buried in Ord. Ord Rotary Club Nebraska State Historical Society

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Hartsuff State Historical Park — 7.8 mi
  A small infantry post of 1874 in the North Loup valley, built of local lime concrete on the raiding road between Lakota and Pawnee country, and kept nearly whole by eighty years of farming.

More markers nearby

• St. Mary's Catholic Church — 4.4 mi
• Calamus Townsite — 7.3 mi
• Fort Hartsuff, 1874-1881 — 7.9 mi
• The Blizzard of 1888 — 8.9 mi