The Western Slope hamlet of Collbran is an odd place to find the grandly named American Servicewomen’s Memorial. The monument is Collbran’s chief attraction, though there’s little competition from the handful of neighboring businesses.
Four flags wave over an arch supported by a memorial stone wall with four placards representing the Army, Navy, Marines and the Air Force/Coast Guard. Collbran activist and Korean war veteran Francis “Dick” Cummins was outraged when he realized, in the late 1970s, that no monument paid tribute to women serving in the U.S. military.
With empathy for the unsung heroines – Collbran, about 40 miles east of Grand Junction, is among the Western Slope towns often overlooked except by oil and gas explorers – Cummins mustered a fundraising campaign to honor the 2 million female armed services veterans who have served since the Revolutionary War.
It took 10 years to collect $20,000 to cover the expense of building materials and more time to persuade the town to donate land for the memorial.
“Wherever Dick could get a buck, he took it, and he got the Collbran- area people and the Job Corps to build this memorial with not one government dollar,” said Nell Ivy.
At 70, Ivy is the monument’s chief caretaker, and she is beginning to worry about finding someone to inherit the job.
“Now that I’m getting old, we only put artificial flowers on the monument,” she said regretfully.
“I can’t get down and plant flowers anymore, even though I’d rather have them.”
Ivy never served in the military – “I was either too young, or busy diapering kids,” she said – but her husband is a vet, and she considers herself an ardent patriot.
When she took on the monument’s upkeep in the early 1990s, she started decorating the pine tree that served as the monument’s Christmas decoration.
“The tree had nothing on it and looked pretty sad,” Ivy said.
She and her husband began making sturdy plywood ornaments – a red ball for the armed forces, a blue bell for the Navy, and stars for the Marines, Coast Guard and Air Force. They made more than 500 ornaments, each bearing the name of a female veteran.
Among the ornaments is one for the late Army Maj. Lanetta Carson of nearby Cedaredge, an Army nurse and World War II veteran who was one of the first women to land on Omaha Beach following D-Day.
“We have a World War I veteran, Charlotte Winters, who was 109 when she died,” Ivy said.
“And the women are from all over the country. As long as it’s any female who has been, is now, or ever was in the service or National Guard, we made her an ornament. We have ladies who were in the Women’s Air Service Pilots during World War II, and women who served in our war between the states. We made ornaments until we ran out of money to buy the wood. I don’t know who’ll make them now.”
