Nurse Lovie Lucinda Rose (August 15, 1889 – October 9, 1918) was born in Doddridge County to the Rev. David Van “D. V.” Rose and Mary Josephine Strother Rose. By 1900, the family had moved to the Salt Lick District of Braxton County, where her father was a merchant, and where Lucinda and her school-age siblings attended school regularly.

Young Lucinda became an effective public speaker. In her fight for the prohibition of alcohol, she earned the Women’s Christian Temperance Union’s “silver medal” in 1909. The next year’s census listed her as the assistant postmaster at Burnsville. That same year, she became a nursing student at Clarksburg’s St. Mary’s Hospital, where her sisters Grace and Mattie were also training. Three other sisters—Clyta, Delcie, and Lulu—would later become nurses, as well. Lucinda finished her training and became a registered nurse in 1914.

The United States entered World War I in 1917, while Lucinda was working as a nurse in Shinnston. In April 1918, she joined the Red Cross with the intention of serving overseas. She trained at Camp Wadsworth in South Carolina and was assigned to the 68^th Unit, U.S. Army Nurses.

In September 1918, the U.S. Treasury Department determined that any nurses captured during the war would not receive pay because they were technically no longer on active duty. Despite this illogical order, Rose boarded a World War I transport, Castle Balmoral, days later in Hoboken, New Jersey, and set sail for England. She was one of only 154 West Virginia nurses to serve throughout the entire war.

Back home, the 1918 flu epidemic was already spreading quickly, including at Camp Wadsworth. Rose was stricken with the virus on her trip and died in a Red Cross Hospital in Portsmouth, England. She was one of millions to die worldwide of the flu, which killed more people than the Great War.

She was initially buried with military honors near Winchester, England, and posthumously awarded the Nurse Corps Badge and the World War I Victory Medal. In 1920, Rose’s body was brought back, with the remains of 12 other nurses, to the United States and Canada. Rose was buried in Clarksburg’s Green Lawn Cemetery and honored as a war hero. As the only West Virginia woman to lose her life overseas during the conflict, her grave includes the Red Cross insignia and the epitaph “died serving in England.”

The Clarksburg Veterans of Foreign Wars renamed its auxiliary after her. In 1930, Governor William Conley led a celebration for her at the city’s First Methodist Episcopal Church and, with her mother and sisters, unveiled a painting of her at the VFW Auxiliary. In Conley’s speech, he never mentioned the pandemic that had killed her.

The voluminous Soldiers of the Great War was published nationally in 1920, commemorating those who had died in World War I from each state. Lucinda Rose graces the cover of the 25-page West Virginia section, the only woman pictured in that chapter.