Clara Barton

Born:  December 25, 1821, North Oxford, Massachusetts

Died:  April 12, 1912, Glen Echo, Maryland

Resting Place:  North Cemetery in Oxford, Massachusetts

Brief History:  Beginning in 1832, when Barton was ten years old, she acted as a nurse to her brother David for two years after he fell from the roof of a barn and sustained a severe head injury. In nursing her brother, she learned how to deliver prescription medications and perform the practice of bloodletting, in which blood was removed from the patient by leeches attached to the skin. David eventually made a full recovery. Wanting to serve her country, Barton went to the railroad station when the victims arrived and nursed 40 men. She personally took supplies to the building to help the soldiers. In April 1863, Barton accompanied her brother, David, to Port Royal, South Carolina in the Union-occupied Sea Islands after he was appointed as a quartermaster within the Union Navy. In 1864, she was appointed by Union General Benjamin Butler as the "lady in charge" of the hospitals at the front of the Army of the James. Among her more harrowing experiences was an incident in which a bullet tore through the sleeve of her dress without striking her and killed a man to whom she was tending.

Clara Barton achieved widespread recognition by delivering lectures around the country about her war experiences from 1865 to 1868. During this time, she met Susan B. Anthony and began an association with the woman's suffrage movement. She also became acquainted with Frederick Douglass and became an activist for civil rights. . In 1869, during her trip to Geneva, Switzerland, Barton was introduced to the Red Cross and Dr. Appia; he later would invite her to be the representative for the American branch of the Red Cross and help her find financial benefactors for the start of the American Red Cross. In the beginning of the Franco-Prussian War, in 1870, she assisted the Grand Duchess of Baden in the preparation of military hospitals and gave the Red Cross society much aid during the war. When Barton returned to the United States, she inaugurated a movement to gain recognition for the International Committee of the Red Cross by the United States government.