Lt. Margaret “Peggy” Nash was a U.S. Navy nurse who served in the Philippines where she was held as a prisoner of war and the recipient of a Bronze Star.
James Markham Marshall Ambler was born on December 30, 1848, at the Dell in Fauquier County, the second of four sons and second of five children of Richard Cary Ambler, a physician, and Susan Marshall Ambler. At age sixteen Ambler joined the 12th Virginia Cavalry Regiment and served during the closing months of the Civil War. He attended Washington College in Lexington from 1865 to 1867 and the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, from which he graduated in 1870.
Ambler practiced medicine for four years before joining the U.S. Navy in 1874 as an assistant surgeon. His duty assignments included service aboard the screw tug USS
Mrs. L.S. Higbee at her desk, photograph by Harris & Ewing, 1918.
All reporting U.S. Navy :Lenah Sutcliffe Higbee was born in Chatham, Canada, on 18 May 1874. After immigrating to the United States, she completed her nursing training at New York Postgraduate Hospital in 1899 and later received further training at Fordham Hospital. On 1 October 1908, she became one the first twenty nurses in the newly-formed Navy Nurse Corps (commonly referred to as The Sacred Twenty). She became the second superintendent of the Navy Nurse Corps in 1911.
Lenah Sutcliffe Higbee served in the United States Navy from 1908-1922. For eleven of her fourteen years of service, Higbee was Superintendent of the Navy Nurse Corps. Chief Nurse Higbee received the Navy Cross for her leadership of the Navy Nurse Corps during World War I. She was the first female to be presented the award.