When her country needed her, Cornelia Elizabeth Thornton of Bena signed up.
She sailed to England on the SS Olympic as a member of the army nursing corps in 1918, but never reached the battlefields of France in World War I.
Nellie Thornton contracted influenza just after arriving in England; it turned into pneumonia, and she died, a victim of the pandemic, on Sept. 28, 1918 at U.S. Army Base #58, AEF, in Portsmouth, England. She was one of 12 Gloucester County residents, and the only woman, who did not come home alive from that war.
Her death so impressed the people of Gloucester County that a new boat for the Gloucester Point-Yorktown ferry very nearly bore her name. The name Cornwallis was chosen, however, as being more widely known among the traveling public, the judges said.
One subscriber to the Gloucester Gazette noted the irony of naming the boat for someone who gave up: “I am surprised at them [the judges] wanting to honor an Englishman (who had to surrender) instead of an Amer...