Walker received notification that her name had been removed from the Medal of Honor rolls. She was 84 years old. She had been wearing the medal for more than fifty years. She kept wearing it. By several accounts, she wore it daily until her death.
## The Last Two Years
Walker died on February 21, 1919, at her home in Oswego, New York. She was 86 years old. The Nineteenth Amendment, which would give women the right to vote in federal elections, would be ratified on August 18, 1920 — 544 days after her death. She did not live to see the constitutional change she had spent decades arguing was unnecessary but working toward anyway.
She was buried in Rural Cemetery in Oswego, in a black suit rather than a dress. Her casket was draped with an American flag. The Medal of Honor was with her.
The obituaries that appeared at her death acknowledged her as a Civil War figure and a suffragist, but the particular irony of her situation — a Medal of Honor recipient who had been stripped of her official recognition while continuing to wear the physical medal — was not what most of them emphasized. She had become, in the decades after the war, a figure that many found more eccentric than heroic. The dress, the medal, the unconventional arguments, the arrests for wearing men’s clothes — these had accumulated into a public image that was easier to dismiss than to engage with seriously.
The case was essentially closed, in public memory, when she was buried. The medal went with her into the ground.