Alice Orme Smith, who would later become a successful landscape architect in Fairfield, served as a nurse with the Red Cross at a base hospital in France from 1917-1919. Red Cross nurses provided much of the medical care for American soldiers in France. Smith worked in mobile hospital units in Paris, Verdun, and St. Mihiel, sometimes under fire, and nursed the wounded from the battle of Chateau Thierry and the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. She was one of 28 nurses to be awarded the French Croix de Guerre for bravery in the field of battle.