BOSTON — This historical city will soon have a new walking tour, but rather than another path of connect-the-monuments, the Women’s Heritage Trail is planned as a series of portraits in a huge outdoor museum, honoring people Boston schoolchildren say should be as well-known as Paul Revere.

The Trail, which will be laid in mid-May, includes the requisite firsts — the first published African-American poet, the first American woman known to have composed a symphony, the founder of the Church of Christ, Scientist.

But the list of the honored, officially announced this week, also will include such dramatic entries as a fugitive slave who made a dangerous journey North dressed as her owner.

“We set about finding women who were very active in Boston history, and who got erased or dropped or forgotten from history books,” said Patricia Morris, who directed the project. “We found women who were on the front pages of their newspapers in their time, but who were forgotten.”

The women were lost in part because of the way Americans remember their past, Morris said.

“We honor generals and presidents and CEOs, and we forget all of the people who do all of the work that support them,” she said. “The women who began the hospitals, who created the parks, that’s history as much as the men who mounted battles.”

Funded by $150,000 from the federal government, the trail will celebrate 20 women in 12 sites stretching over 5 1/2 miles of downtown Boston.

Gleaned from a list of 145, the 20 were elected, after heated debate and campaigning, by about 1,000 public school students and adults, Morris said.

“These kids, they are just wonderful. They had debates about which women should be elected,” Morris said. “You have these wonderful little sixth-grade immigrant children talking about Louisa May Alcott and why she was a wonderful woman.”

Far and away the top vote-getter was Phyllis Wheatley, the first published African-American woman poet, Morris said.