Ellen May Tower, daughter of Civil War Captain Samuel and Sarah Tower, was born in Byron on May 8, 1868, attended Chaffee School, the Byron Village School, and a nurse’s training program at Detroit’s Grace Hospital, and worked for several years at the Michigan School for the Blind. On April 21, 1898, she volunteered for service as an army nurse in the event of war between the United States and Spain, and after war was declared three days later she took her oath on September 1, 1898, and was sent to Camp Wikoff at Montauk Point, New York. Known as one of the Camp Wikoff Angels, she cared for soldiers returned to the United States to recover from injuries or disease, then in late September 1898 volunteered for duty in Puerto Rico, where she died of typhoid fever in a hospital tent on December 9, 1898, after only ten weeks abroad. Her remains arrived in Detroit on January 15, 1899, and her funeral was held in Byron two days later, an event hailed by the Owosso Evening Argus as the first military funeral in Michigan for a woman, attended by thousands of service men, villagers, and visitors, with her eulogy delivered by Dr. Sterling, who had awarded her nursing diploma five years earlier on the same day. The Tower family had moved to Onaway in the 1880s, and the nearby village of Tower was named for her when it was founded in 1899.