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wiii oe in uajciawn Cemetery.Clara Barton’s missing records discoveredAssociated PressWASHINGTON — She is best known for ministering to wounded Civil War soldiers on bloody battlefields and for establishing the American arm of an international relief organization.But the legendary war nurse Clara Barton also was the first woman to head a governmentbureau, assuming the task of locating missing soldiers from the North-South conflict and contacting their families. Federal historians, with the surprise discovery recently of records in a government attic, now have documented some of her efforts from 1865 to 1868.“When the battle was over, she deeded something to do,” Gary §cott, National Park Service regional historian, said Thursday, She would compile missing soldiers’ lists and send them to post offices across the country to try tolocate the soldiers.”Scott uncovered one of the lists during the past few weeks while going through boxes of documents in die attic of a building about to be demolished.The building, about halfway between the White House and the Capitol, once housed Barton’s Missing Persons Office. A worker for a contractor alerted the Park Service to the attic treasures before the building owned by the government’s General Sevices Administration was taken down.The discovery of a sign from Barton’s office first linked the documents to her operation.“It was quite remarkable to us that this stuff came from the. Civil War,” Scott said.Government records, Civil War-era newspapers, leftover wallpaper remnants and even 19th-century clothes, from embroidered slippersin atticto a frock coat, which “looked like something Abraham Lincoln would have worn,” were among the items stowed in a sealed off ' crawl space, Scott said. Some of i the attic artifacts indicated the ;office may have been used as a res- iidence, according to Scott, who ! believes Barton may have lived in : the building. |The unexpected find of the doc- ! uments that languished for more • than a century highlights a lesser ! known period of Barton’s life and ' of post-Civil War efforts to heal the 1 nation. |Bom in North Oxford, Mass., in 1821, Barton was a teacher and government worker before tending ! to wounded soldiers. jShe got into the missing soldiersbusiness when a prisoner of war brought her a list of dead soldiers from the legendary Andersonvilk Confederate prison camp.
Newspaper Details
Paris News
Paris, Texas, US
Fri, Nov 28, 1997
Page 11
Full Page
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MT, USA 25 Jul 2020
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