Walker worked in this environment from September 1863 until her capture in April 1864. The seven months of her formal contract service were spent in some of the most demanding operational conditions of the entire war. The service the original citation recognized was not service in a relatively quiet rear-area hospital but service in a theater that was actively contesting some of the most consequential military decisions of the conflict.
## Legacy: What the Medal Means in Retrospect
The Congressional Gold Medal is Congress’s highest civilian honor and is distinct from the Medal of Honor — a distinction the guardrails for this article rightly emphasize. Walker received the Medal of Honor, not the Congressional Gold Medal. These are separate recognitions that should not be conflated.
The Medal of Honor she received in 1865, lost in 1917, and recovered posthumously in 1977 is the same decoration that has been given to soldiers for acts of combat valor across more than 160 years of American history. That she received it — and remains the only woman to have done so — is the product of a specific set of historical circumstances: the 1865 standards that recognized sustained service rather than requiring combat valor; the Army’s willingness, in that specific moment, to find a mechanism to recognize a woman whose formal commission it had refused to grant; and the survival, through the administrative rescission and the decades of dormancy, of the case for her restoration.
She was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 2000. The U.S. Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp in her honor in 1982. A Liberty ship, the SS Mary Walker, had been named for her during World War II. Military medical facilities — the Walker Clinic at Fort Irwin, a reserve center in Walker, Michigan, the Whitman-Walker Clinic in Washington, D.C. — carry her name. The Army post formerly known as Fort A.P. Hill in Virginia was renamed Fort Walker in August 2023, making her the first woman with a U.S. military installation named exclusively for her; the name was reverted in June 2025.