| Clara Barton is famous as the founder of the American Red Cross. Born in North Oxford, Massachusetts on Christmas Day, as a child she nursed her sickly older brother David for two years, which experience attracted her to nursing. She served during the Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War, and the Spanish-American War, earning the nickname "Angel of the Battlefield." It was in the early 1870s during the Franco-Prussian War that she first heard of the International Red Cross. |  |
| After a five-year
campaign she founded the American Red Cross in 1882. She served as its
President the rest of her life. In addition to her Civil War nursing duties,
she wrote letters home for soldiers who were too weak to write. Her portable
writing desk, a handmade quilt signed by Civil War soldiers, and other
personal memorabilia are on display at the Clara
Barton Birthplace Museum in North Oxford, Massachusetts.
Clara was also among the medical personnel who spent several years in Andersonville, Georgia after the Civil War, identifying the graves of soldiers at what is now the Andersonville National Historic Site. She marked almost all of the 12,912 gravesites in the National Cemetery here, and raised the first American flag to fly over the cemetery. The traumatic experience led to a nervous breakdown, and her fateful trip to Europe. A memorial sundial was erected at the cemetery in 1915 as a monument to Clara, the first memorial in a national cemetery which honors a civilian not buried there. Visitors can also see the stockade site and surrounding fortifications, plus unfinished escape tunnels made by the prisoners. Clara died in Oxford, Massachusetts in 1912 at the age of 91, and is buried in the family plot at the North Cemetery, less than three miles from her birthplace in North Oxford. A large red stone cross tops her tomb. For specific travel information about these sites, check the "Travel Resources" page. |