More Progress on the Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office Museum

     We’re still working hard on getting the Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office ready to open!  The restoration work has been completed, and now we are working on finishing the welcome center, putting up the informational panels, displaying a few artifacts, and determining how the tours will proceed through the space.  So, earlier this week a group of the museum staff visited the space for a “practice tour.”  

We finally have an admissions desk – and who wouldn’t want to see Jake’s smiling face welcoming them to the museum?

Judy and Jake look on as Susan starts the tour in the Welcome Center, where visitors will first learn a little about Clara Barton and life in Washington D.C.

The architecture and various features of the building will be part of the tour as well.  On the third floor, where the Missing Soldiers Office was located, is an original bracket for a fire extinguisher.  The two holes would have held leather buckets filled with sand.

Here in Clara Barton’s Reception Room you can see the holes for the stovepipes and the lightwell windows.   

Though reproduction gas lamps are displayed in most of the rooms, one of the boarding rooms is equipped with an oil lamp.  The oil lamp would have predated the gas lamps. 

Several sections of wallpaper original to the building have been preserved behind Plexiglas.  Here in the space which housed the Missing Soldiers Office is one section which shows two of the different wallpapers that were used in the room.

     I hope you have enjoyed this little “sneak peek” into the progress toward opening Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office!  If you missed the last update on the restoration work you can see that here.  We are anticipating the museum’s grand opening in the next few months, so you shouldn’t be kept waiting for too much longer!

Photos courtesy of the National Museum of Civil War Medicine.