The
National Museum of Civil War Medicine is about to gain another satellite
location, the Clara Barton’s Missing Soldiers Office, which will be located in
Washington D.C. This means I will be responsible for the
artifacts at three different sites. Overall,
it’s an exciting prospect though!
You may
recall that Clara Barton founded the American Red Cross after the Civil
War. During the Civil War she was known
as the “Angel of the Battlefield” in recognition of her care of the wounded
soldiers and her work in getting much-needed medical supplies to the
battlefields. In 1865, she started the
Missing Soldiers Office from her room in a boarding house on 7th St.
in Washington D.C., and she responded to over 63,000 letters with inquiries
about missing soldiers. By 1867 she had
discovered the fates of over 22,000 men.
This is the exterior of the building which housed Clara Barton and her Missing Soldiers Office. You can see the windows to her rooms on the third floor. |
By 1996, the
building had been abandoned
for many years, and was about to be demolished. The building is
owned by the General Services Administration, and Richard Lyons, a GSA employee, happened to
check the attic of the building. He discovered several boxes of items which
belonged to Clara Barton. The plans for
demolition were cancelled, and the GSA eventually approached the NMCWM to manage
Clara Barton’s Missing Soldiers Office.
The agreement was approved recently, and everyone is eager to move
forward. The Clara Barton site will not
be open to the public until sometime next year though, since there is quite a
bit of work still to do!
Here’s one end of the room. You can see the wood floor, the horsehair plaster on the upper portion of the wall, the wallpaper on the lower portion of the wall, and the holes for the stove pipes. |
Last
Friday, several of us from the GSA and the NMCWM took time to clean up the
space a little. It has many years’ of
accumulated dust and dirt and it needs some repairs, but it appears pretty much
as Clara left it.
The space
will be restored by professionals. We
were just there to clean up enough for a crew from C-Span to come in and film
it on Monday.
So,
although the Clara Barton artifacts are owned by GSA, I will be responsible for
the care of the ones which will be on display.
We plan on displaying a few here at the NMCWM in the near future. Of course, most of them will be displayed at
the new Clara Barton’s Missing Soldiers Office.
In the meantime, I need to assess which ones are stable enough to
display and which ones need conservation work done.
I’m not
going to show too many of the artifacts yet; I do want people to come visit the
museum when it opens! I’m sure I’ll be
giving you some sneak peeks at the work as it progresses though.
You can see more information about Clara Barton's Missing Soldiers Office here: http://www.civilwarmed.org/clara-barton-missing-soldiers-office/
Photos
courtesy of the National Museum of Civil War Medicine.
Wow! Is this the same office that at one time collapsed because of the weight of all of the documents it held? I read about it in The Republic of Suffering by Drew Gilpin Faust. What a cool project :)
ReplyDeleteI have to admit that this is a story I have not heard! I don't think it was this office though, as the floor does not appear to have had repairs made to ti.
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