The third floor of this building contains restored rooms and items related to when Clara Barton lived at this location during and immediately after the Civil War. She used this property not only as her residence, but also to store supplies she received for her work on battlefields, and later as an office to handle correspondence concerning missing soldiers. In 1865, Barton hired a staff and opened the Office of Correspondence with the Friends of the Missing Men of the United States Army in this building.
Barton took up the cause of grieving parents, family, and friends whose husbands, sons, brothers, and neighbors were missing. She responded to more than 63,000 letters, most of which required some kind of research that eventually lead to published lists of the names of the missing. Anyone with knowledge of their whereabouts or death could contact Barton. By the time the office closed in 1868, she and her staff had identified the fate of more than 22,000 men.
Clara Barton’s Missing Soldiers Office went covered up for 130 years and was rediscovered by Richard Lyons of the General Services Administration in 1996, when the building was scheduled for demolition. Lyons’ discovery sparked two decades of hard work and collaboration to save the building and turn it into the Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office Museum, which opened in 2015.
Hours
11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Friday and Saturday (walk-in)
All other times, the museum is open only to group reservations of at least 10 people.
Visit the Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office Museum website
Read More: This Museum Is Small, But the Woman It Celebrates Was Larger Than Life