Front and Side View Portraits of Army Nurse Harriet Elizabeth Putman

These two sepia portrait photographs portray Harriet Elizabeth Putman (Putnam) Wing (August 16, 1894 - August 18, 1971). She is shown looking at the camera in one photo, and a second one shows her in profile. She wears a round-brimmed hat and military uniform. On her left collar, she wears the collar device of the Army School of Nursing, a lamp superimposed on a caduceus. The Army School of Nursing was authorized by the Secretary of War in 1918 as a way to educate nurses to be quickly mobilized. This collar device indicates that she was a student nurse at the time of the photo, which dates from circa 1918.

Harriet Putman (also spelled Putnam) was born in Worthington and graduated from Worthington High School in 1914, the year that World War I began in Europe. Three years later, in April, 1917, the United States entered the Great War, as it was then called.

By October 2018 Putman appears in the records for Camp Sherman, a huge military garrison near Chillicothe, as an Army Student Nurse. Over the summer of 1917, more than 2000 buildings had risen on the site of farmland and what is now the Hopewell Culture National Historical Park. More than 120,000 men passed through Camp Sherman before it was decommissioned in 1921. The 83rd Infantry Division of the U.S. Army shipped out for Europe on June 5, 1918. Units belonging to other divisions trained there as well, including African-American regiments. During her time there, Putman would have known of a camp library, 11 YMCAs, theaters to entertain the soldiers, and a detention facility to accommodate the hundreds of German prisoners of war captured during the last few months of the war, as well as the soldiers’ barracks and the infirmary where she worked.

As a “charge nurse” on her ward, Putman held a supervisory role; she was known for her perfectionism in her care for patients, and demanded the same of those under her supervision.

Putman’s documented time at Camp Sherman coincided with one of the most deadly months of the war. Alongside the slaughter in the trenches in western Europe, a frightening virus killed soldiers and civilians alike across the globe. More U.S. soldiers died of the new "Spanish flu" than perished in the actual fighting. All told, an estimated 43,000 American troops died in the deadly pandemic. At Camp Sherman, one of the largest military camps in the U.S., the influenza virus infected thousands of young soldiers and staff. Putman herself was off duty for several weeks in mid-October with "Lobar-pneumonia." She was back by October 31. A nursing staff roster from than month suggests that she was one of only 33 student nurses treating the sick and dying. They witnessed a terrible death toll: twelve hundred soldiers died at Camp Sherman during a few weeks that October.

The war itself ended with the Armistice of November 11, just a few weeks after that dire month. On November 13, nine African-American nurses were assigned to Camp Sherman in a rare exception to the Army’s usual segregation of Black soldiers and staff. Several of them appear in Putman’s photos from her time working in the camp hospital.

With the end of the war, many of the 50,000 seriously wounded, gassed, and disabled American soldiers began to be sent home for further treatment. And, as the influenza infections began to dissipate in early 1919, nursing duties at Camp Sherman would have shifted to caring for the newly returned patients hospitalized there. Among those soldiers was Charles Dignan Wing, Putman’s future husband.

Bringing some two million troops home from France was one of the last tasks for the American Expeditionary Force. Wing was seriously wounded and gassed on July 15, 1918, in the Battle of Chateau-Thierry. Though there is no record of when Wing returned home, he almost certainly remained in an Army hospital base camp in France until the war was over. The Atlantic crossing had been notoriously dangerous, with German submarines attacking civilian, merchant, and Navy vessels indiscriminately. The military was unlikely to risk their soldiers and their ships under these circumstances. Most likely Wing arrived at Camp Sherman sometime during the first months of 1919, where he met Putman, the charge nurse on his ward.

Wing was released from active duty on August 14, 1919, as part of the national demobilization of soldiers, and received an honorable discharge.

Charles Wing and Harriet Putman (Putman) married on July 7, 1920, in Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Cleveland. This would spell the end of Putman’s career as an Army nurse, as married women were not allowed to serve.

Charles and Harriet Putman (Putnam) Wing spent the rest of their lives in Worthington. Their daughter May was born in Worthington in 1921. Harriet worked as a nurse for Dr. George Bonnell and his son, also Dr. George Bonnell. Father and son took care of several generations of Worthington families.

Charles Wing’s battle wound was a severe one that troubled him for the rest of his life. After the war he spent much of the next few years in and out of hospitals. His badly mangled right leg would eventually need to be amputated; family oral history reports that his wife Harriet was the nurse who held his leg during the procedure. He received the Purple Heart in 1932, the first year it was awarded in modern form.

Wing would go on to hold numerous official positions in Worthington over the course of 37 years--"an unparalleled career of service to the community," according to the "Worthington News." Wing first became involved in civic affairs in 1925, when he was hired as the assistant village clerk. At various times during the following years he served as acting city manager, acting safety director, acting service director, acting health director, city clerk, chief deputy clerk, mayor’s clerk, and building inspector’s clerk. In 1942 Wing was named air raid warden for Sharon Township.