On Wednesday, beneath a nearly cloudless sky, Mrs. Harmon’s remains, which had been sitting in a black box on a shelf in her daughter’s bedroom closet for a year and a half, finally came to rest in Arlington, in an understated columbarium.

A handful of women who flew alongside Mrs. Harmon and many more who came after her traveled from across the country to bear witness and, in some cases, to give testimonies to a path she had helped clear.

“Finally, we’re over the last fight. We had to fight all the way along. I didn’t think we’d have to fight to be buried,” said Florence Reynolds, a member of the unit and a friend of Mrs. Harmon known as Shutsy. “I wanted to be here to make sure they didn’t fuss it up.”

In the end, they did not. Mrs. Harmon, her remains present in a carved wooden box, was honored with a three-volley salute, a color guard and the playing of taps.

By the count of Katherine Landdeck, a historian at Texas Woman’s University who is writing a history of the WASPs, fewer than 100 members of the unit are still alive. Only a handful have expressed interest in funerals at Arlington and so, she added, Mrs. Harmon’s service was something of a stand-in for a whole unit that is largely unknown outside of family and the women who followed it into flight.

It was a fitting role for Mrs. Harmon, who helped hold the group together even as they returned to civilian life in 1944. Mrs. Harmon herself moved to Oakland, Calif., and worked as an air traffic controller while she waited for her husband to return from the Pacific. At the war’s end, the young couple reunited in the growing Maryland suburbs of Washington to start a family.