Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office

06/02/2026

Our June Book of the Month is Last Seen: The Enduring Search by Formerly Enslaved People to Find Their Lost Families by Judith Giesberg.

This incredible read is available for purchase in our museum shop, or online at clarabartonmuseum.org!

06/01/2026

05/29/2026

"Nurse Mary A.E. Keen of Seminary Hospital, Washington, D.C., and Chesapeake Hospital, Fort Monroe, Virginia" is a photograph in the collections of the Library of Congress.

Nurse Keen served between 1861-1865 in Army hospitals under the jurisdiction of Dorothea Dix.

Photo: Library of Congress

05/28/2026

Email from National Museum of Civil War Medicine NMCWM Mourns the Passing of Founder Dr. Gordon Dammann   NEWS RELEASE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF CIVIL WAR MEDICINE MOURNS THE PASSING OF FOUNDER DR. GORDON DA

05/28/2026

Almira Fales
Volunteer Nurse with the United States Sanitary Commission
Born: October 24, 1809 in Pittstown, New York
Died: November 8, 1868 in Washington, DC

Almira Fales apparently believed that a civil war was imminent in December 1860. She allegedly began gathering supplies that would be necessary for the treatment of wounded and sick soldiers as the secession crisis began in the months before Fort Sumter.

Once the Civil War broke out in April 1861, she became an early relief worker with the United States Sanitary Commission. She engaged in nursing care in Washington, DC in the war's early months, before taking her relief efforts to the battlefields of Virginia and as far west as Tennessee.

Of Fales, a biographer wrote: "Through all those years, every day, she gave her life, her strength, her nursing, her mother-love to our soldiers. For her to be a soldier's nurse meant... days and nights of untiring toil; it meant the lowliest office, the most menial service; it meant the renouncing of all personal comfort, the sharing of her last possession with the soldier of her country; it meant patience, and watching, and unalterable love."

Photo credit: Library of Congress

05/28/2026

Last week, the Congressional Cemetery Docent Corps visited a hidden gem in downtown DC, the Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office Museum. Site manager Madeleine Thompson led an inspiring and insightful tour of the building on 7th Street NW where Barton and others worked to identify 22,000 men who were missing at the close of the Civil War. Thank you to the Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office staff for welcoming our docents and sharing this important history.

05/27/2026

How do clothing and conflict intertwine? What can a hoop skirt, a soldier’s shirt, or a nurse’s apron reveal about a country at war with itself?

Join Emma Rowland at the Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office Museum on July 11, 2026 at 2PM for Fashion on the Front Lines: Dressing America in the Civil War!

For more information: https://clarabartonmuseum.org/event/fashion-on-the-front-lines-dressing-america-in-the-civil-war/

05/25/2026

originated during the Civil War when communities began decorating graves with flowers to commemorate fallen soldiers. Three years after the Civil War ended, on May 5, 1868, General John A. Logan, head of an organization of Union veterans — the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) — established Decoration Day as a time for the nation to decorate the graves of the war dead with flowers and May 30 was chosen for the first national Decoration Day. In 1971, Memorial Day was declared a national holiday by an act of Congress, though it is still sometimes called Decoration Day. It was then also placed on the last Monday in May, as were some other federal holidays. Many Southern states also have their own days for honoring the Confederate dead.

In this image, then-President Ulysses S. Grant and General John Logan are seated at the flag-draped Old Amphitheater, Arlington Cemetery, Arlington, Va., for Decoration Day ceremonies on May 30, 1873.

Photo: Library of Congress

05/25/2026

We pause today to honor all who gave their lives in service.

On May 30, 1868, communities across the country gathered to decorate the graves of fallen soldiers for the first national Decoration Day, established by General John A. Logan of the Grand Army of the Republic. For Clara Barton, honoring the fallen also meant accounting for those with no grave to decorate. From her Washington, D.C. boarding house, she spent years corresponding with families searching for answers about the men who never came home.

Harper's Weekly captured the ceremonies at Arlington National Cemetery, including the Civil War Unknowns Monument - a tribute to the more than 2,100 unidentified soldiers buried there, and a symbol of the men Barton sought answers for.

What began as Decoration Day soon became Memorial Day, set each year on the last Monday in May - chosen in part so that flowers would be in bloom across the country to decorate the graves of the fallen.

05/23/2026

in 1865, the Grand Review began in Washington, DC. Over 145,000 soldiers marched on Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol towards the White House, just blocks from Clara Barton's home on 7th Street.