Ephrata's Veterans' Plaza

Ephrata's Veterans' Plaza is dedicated to all American servicemen and women from all wars and calls on future generations to honor their service and remember those memorialized there. The plaza includes tributes and quotations on war, sacrifice, peace, and remembrance, including words by Tuscarora tradition, Samuel Butler, Douglas MacArthur, and Dick Winters. Winters, who lived from 1918 to 2011, commanded Easy Company, 506 Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, and reflected with humility on leading his men into battle. A poem titled "Soldier," by Ed Coet, presents a son's awakening to the sacrifices of American soldiers through witnessing a veteran's burial and coming to understand his own father's wartime suffering. The plaza also presents Dick Winters' leadership principles, emphasizing character, courage, physical and mental toughness, teamwork, responsible delegation, preparation, humility, self-reflection, earned respect, and perseverance. Another tribute traces Winters' Central Pennsylvania roots from his birth at Lancaster General Hospital on January 21, 1918, through childhood years in New Holland, Ephrata, and Lancaster, his schooling, his enlistment in the U.S. Army in 1941 and discharge in 1945 as a major, his postwar work and family life, his return to Pennsylvania, his farm and feed business, the publication in 1992 of the book that made him famous, and his death on January 2, 2011, followed by burial with family at Bergstresse Cemetery in Ephrata.

Ephrata, Pennsylvania · United States