Virginia ("Ginnie") Bethel Moon 1844-1926

Ginnie Moon and her sister Charlotte carried information between the lines, and Ginnie smuggled quinine and morphine to the Confederacy, hidden in her hoop skirts. Arrested in Memphis after Union forces took the city, she escaped with her sister's help. When the sisters were captured, she swallowed a hidden message, and General Ambrose Burnside held both sisters and their mother under house arrest for several months without charges. After the war she ran a boarding house, helped during the 1870s epidemics and, in her seventies, acted in silent films. She died in 1925.

What the plaque says

Virginia ("Ginnie") Bethel Moon 1844-1926 The daughter of a Confederate sympathizer, Ginnie Moon was a noted Southern Civil War spy. Born in Ohio, Ginnie moved to Memphis with her mother in 1862. She was arrested for spying soon after the Federal Army occupied the city, but escaped to continue her work elsewhere. Ginnie returned to Memphis after the war and was a heroine of the yellow fever epidemics of the 1870s. She died in New York City.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Beale Street — 0.5 mi
  The street that became the center of Black Memphis after the Civil War, home to Church's Park, W. C. Handy, Ida B. Wells and the blues, now a National Historic Landmark district.
• National Civil Rights Museum — 0.9 mi
  The Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was killed on April 4, 1968, kept as a museum of the civil rights movement from the nineteenth century to today.
• 1866 Memphis Massacre Marker at Army Park — 1.0 mi
  A privately funded NAACP marker in a small downtown park, placed in 2016, that names the May 1866 attack on Black South Memphis as a massacre.
• Sun Studio — 1.1 mi
  The small Union Avenue room where Sam Phillips recorded Rocket 88, Howlin' Wolf, Elvis Presley and the Million Dollar Quartet, now a National Historic Landmark.

More markers nearby

• Elizabeth Avery Meriwether — steps away
• The Sultana Disaster — steps away
• Piggly Wiggly — steps away
• First Tennessee Bank — steps away