A nurse, teacher, orator, and humanitarian, Clara Barton organized the American Red Cross. During the Civil War, she established the main agency to obtain and distribute supplies to soldiers, traveling directly to the front lines, and gaining the nickname “The Angel of the Battlefield.” In the years immediately after the war (1865 – 1868), she ran the Office of Missing Soldiers, in the top floor of a building that still stands at 437 Seventh St. NW in the Gallery Place neighborhood of DC.
Barton is the author of The Red Cross in Peace and War (1898) and Story of the Red Cross: Glimpses of Field Work (1904) as well as two memoirs. She lived in this home for the last 15 years of her life.
She is also remembered in the area by the Clara Barton Parkway that runs between Glen Echo and Potomac, Maryland. Several schools across the U.S. are named for her, as well as crater on the planet Venus.
The Homes
5801 Oxford Road, Glen Echo, MD
This house was built on land donated by Edwin and Edward Baltzley, developers of the Glen Echo Chatatauqua, in the hopes that Barton’s fame would inspire others to move to the area. The house consists of lumber salvaged from Red Cross buildings erected to deal with the emergency of the Johnstown Flood of 1889. The house was built to be both a home for Barton and the headquarters of the Red Cross, with 36 rooms and 38 closets, in tiers on three floors. The rooms face inward to a central gallery lighted with clerestory windows of colored glass. The two stone tiers flanking the front of the house were built to match the style of other Chautauqua buildings. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974.
Site administered by the National Park Service. Free tours offered on the hour daily between 10:00 am and 4:00 pm.
926 T Street NW, Washington, DC
437 Seventh St. NW, Washington, DC (Office of Missing Soldiers)
Administered through the National Museum of Civil War Medicine, tours are offered Thursdays through Saturdays.
Clara Barton
5801 Oxford Road
Located in Maryland
Clara Barton
926 T Street NW, Washington DC
Located in U Street/Strivers Section neighborhood, Northwest - East of Rock Creek
Clara Barton
437 Seventh St. NW
Located in Gallery Place neighborhood,