Biography | Clara Barton — The Wagon of Dressings That Arrived When the Army's Had Not

The plaque on this rock says the Battle of Antietam led to the birth of the American Red Cross. The chain was longer than that, and most of it ran through Europe.

What is documented about 17 September 1862 is narrower and harder. The Army of the Potomac's medical supplies were far behind the army, and the surgeons working the field hospitals north of Sharpsburg had run out of everything.

Brigade-Surgeon James L. Dunn wrote to his family that they had "expended every bandage, torn up every sheet in the house" before Barton drove up with a team "loaded down with dressings of every kind, and everything we could ask for."

She had spent the previous year collecting those supplies herself, through newspaper appeals and private donations, because no agency existed to do it for her.

Accounts differ on the hour. The National Park Service places her at the northern edge of the Cornfield around noon; the Clara Barton Museum has her at Samuel Poffenberger's farm, then in use as a field hospital, by nine in the morning.

She stayed through the night, and when the surgeons ran out of light she produced lanterns from the same wagon.

One incident survives in her own words. While she held a wounded man and gave him water, a ball passed between her body and her right arm and killed him; she wrote that it cut through his chest from shoulder to shoulder.

Dunn's letter appeared in the Conneautville Record on 25 October 1862 and was reprinted in the Hartford Courant a month later. In it he called her the angel of the battlefield, and the phrase followed her for the rest of her life.

The Red Cross itself came later and by another route. Barton encountered the movement in Europe after the war, worked in relief during the Franco-Prussian War, and founded the American Red Cross in 1881 — nineteen years after this field.

The monument was dedicated on 9 September 1962; the Historical Marker Database records the Washington County chapter of the American National Red Cross as its sponsor. The red cross set into the stone is built from a brick taken from the chimney of the house where she was born in North Oxford, Massachusetts.

It stands on Mansfield Avenue at the second stop of the battlefield tour, by the Poffenberger farm at the north end of the field. That is a different Poffenberger property from Samuel's, which makes this a monument near the ground she worked rather than on it.

📸 Cover: The Clara Barton Monument on Mansfield Avenue, Antietam National Battlefield. Photo by Chris Light, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.