The 2024 American Women quarter placed her on the currency, in the commemorative coin program that the United States Mint has used to honor figures in American women’s history. The quarter programs reach a much larger audience than stamps or institutional honors, since the coins circulate in ordinary commercial life and are noticed by people who are not specifically interested in history or women’s history.
## Oswego and the Local Memory
Oswego, New York — the town where Walker was born in 1832, where she returned after the Civil War, and where she died in 1919 — has been the primary site of local memory and commemoration for her legacy.
The Rural Cemetery in Oswego, where she is buried, is the specific location where the physical remains of her story rest. The gravesite has been a place of pilgrimage for people interested in her history, particularly after the 1977 restoration brought increased attention to her story.
The statue installed in 2012 in front of the Oswego Town Hall stands near the site where she grew up and near the cemetery where she is buried, completing a geographic loop: born in this place, grew up working the farm her father built, left to study medicine and serve in a war and fight for women’s rights for five decades, returned, and is remembered here.
SUNY Oswego’s medical and health facilities bear her name, connecting the institution to its most historically prominent local figure in medicine. The specific honor of naming educational facilities after Walker reflects the particular relevance of her story to the institution’s location — this is where she grew up, this is where the story began.