News---Clara Barton's D.C. Office of Missing Soldiers To Be Curated By National Museuem of Civil War Medicine

Civil War Medical Museum To Manage Missing Soldiers Office, National Museum of Civil War Medicine, Press Release.

The National Museum of Civil War Medicine (NMCWM) will open the Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office Museum this year at 437 7th St. NW, Washington. The General Services Administration (GSA), which owns the building, chose the Frederick, Md., non-profit museum whose mission is preserving and researching the legacy of Civil War medicine, to operate the museum.

Barton lived in the third-floor rooms during and immediately after the war. Her living quarters and office were there until 1867. During the war supplies for her nursing work were stored in these rooms. In 1865 Barton hired staff and opened the Office of Correspondence with the Friends of the Missing Men of the United States Army.

The office responded to more than 63,000 letters seeking information about soldiers and published lists of missing men. The fate of more than 22,000 soldiers had been learned by the time the office closed in 1867. The doors to the apartment were closed in 1875. The suite of rooms was discovered in 1997 as GSA workers were preparing the building for demolition.

In announcing the new site NMCWM Executive Director George Wunderlich said, “What she did in nursing is incredibly important and we don’t want to diminish that at all. But to say that Clara Barton is a nurse is a gross understatement of her importance. The fact is that she was a relief organizer at a time when women didn’t do that.”

He said, “The story of the rediscovery of the building as well as the story of Barton’s life while she lived there will be the essence of the visitor experience at the museum.” Barton’s words will be used in audio scripts and exhibit labels. Artifacts, images and sounds will enhance the interpretation.

“The overarching theme for the visitor experience will be the sensation of discovering a place, and through the place a remarkable person, and through the person the values that shaped her life and work,” Wunderlich said. The National Museum of Civil War Medicine operates out of a downtown Frederick building with nearly 7,000 square feet of exhibit space.

Its Pry House Field Hospital Museum on the grounds of Antietam National Battlefield, where Dr. Jonathan Letterman devised his system of battlefield medicine, is interpreted as a house museum. Its large bank barn was a field hospital that treated more than 400 men after the battle.

For More Information on Clara Barton see Antietam National Battlefield Park.

For More Information on the National Museum of Civil War Medicine

CWL: The work of NMCWM is an essential resource for enthusiasts and scholars. Its work over the past 15 years has done much to broaden and deepen our understanding of the lives and experiences of American Civil War soldiers. CWL encourages your support of this extraordinary organization, its museums, and its educational efforts.

Guest Blogger: Molly Beutz Land

It's my pleasure to welcome Molly Beutz Land (left) as our guest blogger today. Molly is an associate professor of law at New York Law School, where she teaches Civil Procedure, Conflict of Laws, International Intellectual Property, and International Human Rights. Drawing on her human rights expertise and background as an IP litigator, Molly's scholarship focuses on access to knowledge and the intersection of intellectual property and human rights, as exemplified by her blog today, in which she discusses her forthcoming article, Protecting Rights Online.

I first met Molly when she was awarded the Robert L. Bernstein Fellowship in International Human Rights in 2002. After completing the fellowship, which she spent at Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights, Molly was a visiting lecturer in law and the Robert M. Cover/Allard K. Lowenstein Fellow in International Human Rights at Yale Law School. Her interest in access to knowledge grows out of her work on economic rights and gender issues while co-teaching the Lowenstein Human Rights Clinic and at Minnesota Advocates, which included filing amicus briefs in cases challenging sexual harassment in schools and discrimination based on sexual orientation before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and leading fact-finding teams reporting on domestic violence against immigrant women in Minnesota, HIV/AIDS and women's rights in Zambia. After graduation from Yale Law School in 2001, Molly clerked for the Honorable Denise Cote in the Southern District of New York. Between 2003 and 2005, she litigated copyright, trademark, and patent cases with Faegre & Benson LLP.
Molly has chosen Clara Barton, the humanitarian, feminist, and founder of the American Red Cross, as her transnational foremother. Barton, born in 1821, performed her first nursing role at the tender age of 11, when she nursed her brother David through a serious illness. Six years later, she became a teacher, founding her own school at the age of 23.

Following her studies, Barton opened a free school in New Jersey. The attendance under her leadership grew to 600 but instead of hiring Barton to head the school, the board hired a man instead. Frustrated, she moved to Washington D.C. and began work as a clerk in the U.S. Patent Office; this was the first time a woman had received a substantial clerkship in the federal government.
With the emergence of the Civil War, Barton refused to take a salary from the government's treasury and dedicated herself aiding soldiers on the front. Never before had women been allowed in hospitals, camps or on battlefields; initially, military and civil officials declined her help. Eventually, she gained the trust of these officials and began receiving supplies from all over the country. As a result of her untiring work, she became known as the "Angel of the Battlefield." Officially, she became the superintendent of Union nurses in 1864 and began obtaining camp and hospital supplies, assistants and military trains for her work on the front. She practiced nursing exclusively on battlefields, experiencing first-hand the horrors of war on sixteen different battlefields.

After learning about and observing the Red Cross while travelling in Europe, Barton learned that the United States had not signed the Treaty of Geneva establishing the institution. After campaigning for the U.S. to join the treaty, which it did in 1882, she became the President of the American National Red Cross, a position she held for twenty-two years until she retired at the age of 83. Barton's work in the United States included humanitarian assistance in peacetime, leading to the "American Amendment" to expand the Geneva Convention to include this concept.
Barton was also a passionate suffragist, working with Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone and others. She received many awards, including the Iron Cross, the Cross of Imperial Russia and the International Red Cross Medal. Heartfelt welcome!

Words from the Well Known: Clara Barton

"While our soldiers fight, I can stand and feed and nurse them. My place is anywhere between the bullet and the battlefield." A statement made during the Battle of the Wilderness, May 1864.

"General Sherman was right when addressing an assemblage of cadets he told htme that war was Hell!Deck it as you will,it is this, and whoever has looked active war full in the face has caught some glimpses of regions as infernal, as he may ever fear to see."

Men "have always known a great deal too much about it [war]for the good of their kind. They have worshipped at Valkyria's shrine, and followed her siren lead, till it has cost a million times more the the whole world is worth, poured out the best blood and crushed the fairest forms the God God has created."

"If I were to speak of war it would not to show you the glories of conquering armies but of the mischief and misery they strew in their tracks; and how, while they marched on with tread of iron and plumes proudly tossing in the breeze, some one must follow closely in their steps, crouching to the earth, toiling in the rain and darkness, shelterless themselves, with no thought of pride or glory, fame or praise, or reward; hearts breaking with pity, faces bathed in tears and hands in blood. This is the side which history never shows." These quotations from The Oxford Dictionary of Civil War Quotations, John D. Wright, ed, Oxford University Press, 2006, pp. 21-22.

The best biography of Clara Barton is Woman of Valor: Clara Barton and the Civil War by Stephen B. Oates, The Free Press, maps, illustrations, notes, index, 527 pages, 1995.

Two of the best wwwsites on Clara Barton are http://www.nps.gov/archive/anti/clara.htm and http://www.nps.gov/clba/

Above (R) is a colorized b/w photograph of Clara Barton. Above (L) is a sign recently discovered in a Washington, D.C. attic believed to be over Clara Barton's 1865 and 1866 office of Missing Soldiers. On the (R) is the Clara Barton Memorial on the Antietam Battlefield. The memorial is located about 300 yards south of a farm at which she established a first aid station. This monument is located on the same road on which the Pennsylvania Reserve Division's monuments stand.