Lt. Samuel I. Parker

Charlotte, NC

In the summer of 1917, weeks after America entered the Great War, the U.S. Army carved a sprawling training cantonment out of the Carolina countryside west of Charlotte and named it for Revolutionary War general Nathanael Greene. For two years Camp Greene turned tens of thousands of raw recruits into soldiers bound for the trenches of France, its muddy streets and hastily built barracks briefly making it one of the largest 'cities' in North Carolina. When the camp closed in 1919, the Mecklenburg Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution set this stone to keep the memory of those men — and the vanished camp — from fading back into the fields.

Salisbury, NC

Lee Slater Overman represented North Carolina in the United States Senate from 1903 to 1930, a long tenure that spanned the Progressive Era and World War I. He was a prominent ally of President Woodrow Wilson, backing the administration's wartime measures, and later chaired a Senate inquiry into wartime disloyalty. His home stood here in Salisbury.

Carthage, NC

James McConnell left North Carolina to join the Lafayette Escadrille, the squadron of American volunteers who flew for France before the United States entered World War I. A pioneering combat aviator, he was killed in action on March 19, 1917 — among the last of the Escadrille's Americans to die before his own country joined the war weeks later.

Spartanburg, SC

When the United States entered the First World War in 1917, Spartanburg became a training ground for the war effort, hosting Camp Wadsworth where thousands of soldiers prepared for the trenches of France. This memorial honors the county's own sons who never came home, and its dedication of an airport to their memory reflects the era's faith in aviation as a symbol of progress rising from wartime sacrifice. The choice to name a place of flight after fallen infantry ties Spartanburg's grief to the new age of the air.