Nurses at Point of Rocks Hospital

Patients at Point of Rocks Hospital were cared for by two pioneer women in medicine, Clara Barton and Harriet Dame, who worked close to the fighting at field hospitals and on the battlefield when most women were not allowed near combat. When the Civil War began, Clara Barton was a clerk in the U.S. Patent Office, and after the First Battle of Bull Run she organized donations of badly needed medical supplies for troops, earning a pass to travel with army ambulances. In early June 1864, she arrived at Point of Rocks Hospital, then made up of twenty lines of long white tents serving the 18th Corps of the Army of the James, where she took charge of nursing and diet for the section caring for United States Colored Troops units of the 18th Corps; she and her staff also prepared meals and did laundry for the men. In August 1864, she left Point of Rocks for a new location across the Appomattox River closer to the fighting. After the war, she worked for the War Department helping families locate missing soldiers, founded the American Red Cross in 1881, and died at her home in Glen Echo, Maryland, on April 12, 1912. Harriet P. Dame joined the 2nd New Hampshire Regiment as a hospital matron in June 1861 and stayed with it through the war, serving at or near the fighting wherever it went. Captured at Second Manassas, she was returned to Federal lines in recognition of her attention to Confederate and Union wounded alike. In September 1864 she became matron of the 18th Corps hospital at Point of Rocks and remained there until the war ended, beloved by the troops she nursed back to health. After the war, the New Hampshire legislature voted her $500 for her service, which she donated toward building a home for veterans of the 2nd New Hampshire; she then served as a pension clerk for the Treasury Department for 28 years, died in New Hampshire in 1900, and after her death became the first woman honored with a portrait hung in the New Hampshire State House.

Virginia · United States