Clara Barton kept a room in Washington as a refuge between exhausting periods of field service, and from her Seventh Street home she began her Civil War battlefield work in 1862, departing for Antietam on a supply wagon filled with donated food and medical supplies. While working as a copyist in the Patent Office at Ninth and F Streets from 1861 to 1865, she could not serve in the Union Army because she was a woman, so she devoted herself to feeding, nursing, and comforting thousands of Union wounded during the nation’s most costly war, which took more than 600,000 American lives. After the war, at her own initiative and expense, she turned her Seventh Street home into a headquarters for the search for missing soldiers, was eventually paid a flat fee of $15,000 by the government, became the first woman to run a federal office, received more than 63,000 letters of inquiry, wrote 41,855 replies, and ultimately identified about 22,000 of 622,000 missing soldiers.
