The Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office was the home of the founder of the American Red Cross during and after the Civil War, where she stored supplies needed for her work as a nurse during the war, and here she established and operated the “Office of Correspondence with the Friends of the Missing Men of the United States Army.”
The mission of the office was to find missing soldiers that haven’t come back from the war. Barton and her staff responded to more than 63,000 letters, and due to their efforts, they were able to identify more than 22,000 missing men.
For 130 years Clara Barton’s Missing Soldiers Office was forgotten. In 1996, Richard Lyons of the General Services Administration rediscovered the place when the building was about to be demolished. Afterward, the site has been restored, and the museum was established as part of the National Museum of Civil War Medicine.
Visit the restored rooms where Barton lived and worked, and explore items related to Barton’s life, such as handwritten letters, tin advertisement signs and a map from the Civil War era with marked hospitals and forts in Washington, D.C.
You can also enjoy special exhibits and events, such as ‘The Washington Navy Yard and the Civil War’, ‘Clara Barton at Andersonville’, and ‘War on Our Doorsteps.’
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