On April 3, 1944, twenty-four-year-old Evelyn Genevieve Sharp, a Women Airforce Service Pilots pilot, died when her P-38 crashed on a hilltop above a ravine about 200 yards north of this location after an engine failure just after takeoff from New Cumberland Airport while she was ferrying the plane from Long Beach, California, to Newark, New Jersey, for the U.S. Army Air Forces. Born in Montana and raised in rural Nebraska, she became the state's best-known aviatrix and was one of the youngest pilots in the country to earn private, commercial, and instructor certificates by age twenty. Before joining the Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron as one of the twenty-eight Originals, she taught more than 350 men to fly in the government's pre-war Civilian Pilot Training Program. That service helped prove to the War Department that women could serve their country during World War II as military pilots. When she died, she was a WASP squadron commander and was three flights away from earning the highest certification then available to women pilots. She was buried in Ord, Nebraska, near the airfield named in her memory.