Clara Barton at Chatham Manor: From Civil War Nurse to Founder of the American Red Cross

"If I have made one heart stronger, or one war less bitter, I regard it as a blessing forever beyond my power to express."
>
— Clara Barton, on what kept her going in hard times

Clara Barton in 1897, the year she moved into her home at Glen Echo, Maryland. She signed this photograph and had many copies made. NPS.

Chatham Manor

Chatham Manor, an 88.65-acre historic estate in Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park, in Stafford County, Virginia, was built between 1768 and 1771 by William Fitzhugh. The grand Georgian-style house overlooking the Rappahannock River was long the center of a large plantation, the core of an estate the Fitzhugh family began building in the early eighteenth century.

During the Civil War, Chatham served as a Union headquarters and field hospital. Few American houses have seen as many important events or hosted as many famous people — among them George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. But it also remembers Clara Barton: educator, humanitarian and a trailblazer for women's rights.

Barton in the war

Barton was one of many volunteers working beside army surgeons at Chatham — Walt Whitman was another.

• When war broke out in 1861, she quit her job to bring supplies to Union soldiers — the start of a lifetime of helping people through war and disaster.
• She pushed past the barriers of her time: it was unusual for a woman to nurse strangers in such intimate circumstances, and she went further still, onto the battlefields themselves to reach the wounded.
• After the war she helped find missing soldiers, mark thousands of graves, and testified before Congress about what she had seen.

The American Red Cross

Barton is best known for founding the American Red Cross.

• Traveling in Switzerland after the war, she learned of the International Red Cross, founded in 1864.
• Back home she wrote pamphlets, lectured and met President Rutherford B. Hayes to build support for an American branch.
• The American Association of the Red Cross was formed on May 21, 1881, and she was elected its president that June. In 1882, the United States joined the International Red Cross.
• She led the Red Cross until 1904 — attending national and international meetings, organizing disaster relief, and helping the homeless and poor — and also founded the National First Aid Association of America, which promoted emergency preparedness and developed first aid kits.

Her work lives on: the American Red Cross still brings help when disaster strikes.

"Writers of sketches, in a friendly desire to compliment me, have been wont to dwell upon my courage, representing me as personally devoid of fear … it is evident I was not constructed that way, as in the earlier years of my life I remember nothing but fear."
>
— Clara Barton, The Story of My Childhood

More: the Clara Barton Papers at the Library of Congress; the Park Service's lesson plan on Clara Barton's house; Clara Barton at Antietam; and more about her.

Sources

Based on "Clara Barton, a Tireless Effort in the Face of Disaster," Clara Barton National Historic Site, Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park and Glen Echo Park, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The 1897 photograph is in the public domain.