Anna Maria Lane disguised herself as a man and served alongside her husband in the Connecticut Continental Line. She was wounded at the Battle of Germantown in 1777 and continued with John Lane through later service in the Virginia light dragoons. Virginia granted her a pension in 1808 for extraordinary military service.

The episode belongs to the less visible institutional history of the Revolution. Patriot governments depended on trained civilians who could turn professional knowledge into public service. Physicians treated disease and wounds, committees enforced agreements and raised supplies, and local leaders connected county communities with state and Continental authorities. Such work rarely produced a single dramatic battlefield moment, but it helped keep armies functioning through shortages, epidemics, displacement, and administrative uncertainty. The surviving commemoration therefore records both an individual life and the network of civilian labor behind independence.

The surviving marker text adds further detail: Near the Bell Tower in Capitol Square stood the barracks of the Public Guard. There, from 1801 to 1807, lived John Lane and his wife, Anna Maria Lane, the only documented woman veteran of the Revolutionary War to reside in Virginia. She disguised herself and enlisted with her husband in the Connecticut Continental Line. "In the garb, and with the courage of a soldier, (she) performed extraordinary military services," and was wounded at Germantown, Pa., in 1777. She followed Lane through his subsequent service in the Virginia light dragoons, and then, after the war, to the Public Guard. Granted a pension in 1808, she died on 13 June 1810.

The site's significance is clearest when interpreted at several scales. Locally, it shows how residents and landscapes were drawn into wartime demands. Regionally, it belonged to routes of communication, supply, government, or military movement. Nationally, it demonstrates that independence emerged from thousands of connected decisions and actions rather than from famous battles alone. The physical location anchors those relationships and helps explain why timing, distance, terrain, and community participation mattered to the outcome.

The marker at Anne Marie Lane Marker makes this history legible in a modern landscape that has changed substantially since the eighteenth century. Its value lies in identifying the approximate place and connecting it to documented people, movements, and institutions. Visitors should distinguish the historic event from the later act of commemoration: the marker is evidence of how the episode has been remembered, while its text and setting guide interpretation of the original event. Considered with contemporary records and the broader campaign, the location adds geographic meaning to a story that might otherwise survive only as names and dates.