Introducing Clara Barton

When we tend to think of America's most famous, we tend to think of grand. We tend to think of grandeur. We tend to think of wealth. And that is not the case with Clara Barton. If you ask any group of people what they know about Clara Barton, we tend to get two answers. The first answer is she was the founder of the American Red Cross. And the second answer is that she was a Civil War nurse. And both of those things are absolutely correct. But to limit Clara Barton to only those two things really limits a person who, in many ways, probably has more of an effect on the 21st century than anyone can imagine. She is the one that proposed what is called the American Amendment that brought to play the Red Cross worldwide to relieve suffering in all types of natural disasters. This was a revolution, and we can't imagine the 21st century without it. When we see news reports about hurricanes, about tsunamis, about tornadoes, about natural disasters of all types, we can't imagine that the Red Cross wouldn't be there. When you come to her offices, the missing soldiers office, you're really coming into a place that was first and foremost a boarding house. It was her home. It's where she lived. And a boarding house is a place that, quite frankly, in the 19th century was not for the wealthy or even the well-to-do or even the upper middle class. This was a place of relatively modest means. She began from these rooms, not only living here, but then collecting supplies, supplies that she would take on to the battlefields at places like Antietam and Fredericksburg and many other. Past that, this office then transformed yet again. It became a place of lobbying. It became a place from which she would go to the halls of power and lobby on behalf of the soldiers who were sick and wounded and their families. Eventually, it would be transformed again at the end of the war in 1865 to the missing soldiers office, a place where people in desperation trying to find their loved ones came to Claire and say, we know you've been in the hospitals. Have you seen our son? Do you know where my husband is? Do you know where my brother is? She was the first person in America to actually step up and say, we need to find these missing soldiers. We need to identify where they are, what happened to them for the final burial, if possible, or at least the final closure for the family. No one had really ever taken an effort to do that before or made the effort to do that before. And that's one of the great things about this museum is we're inviting people to come and learn what she did, to learn how she did it, and finally to step up and take actions themselves by becoming a volunteer, by taking on a task that takes her story out of the 19th century and puts it onto the streets of the 21st century in the very visitors that come here that are then transformed by her story, transformed from just average people to people of action.