Clara Barton's Missing Soldiers Office

In 1996, inspectors looking through the third story of the building at 437 7th Street, Washington, D.C., came upon an attic holding a bounty of historical artifacts that identified the floor as Clara Barton’s Missing Soldiers Office where, from 1865 to 1868, Barton and assistants worked cataloguing the names of soldiers missing in the Civil War.

In Savage Armed, Dorothea Broadwell and her friend Mary Morton, whose husband dies in Dorothea’s arms, work for Clara Barton after the war cataloguing missing soldiers and attempting to locate their remains.

Walking up the meticulously preserved third story stairway transports you back in time to the 1860s.

The museum currently features an exhibit of Alexander Gardiner photographs taken shortly after the Battle of Antietam where over 22,000 Federal and Confederate soldiers were killed, wounded, or went missing on a single day, September 17, 1862.

In a flashback in Savage Armed, Andrew Pease is wounded in the costly Battle of Antietam. Realizing the very arbitrary nature of a battle’s death toll, Andrew resolves to find an opportunity to do away with his rival, Caleb Crowell, who has stolen the heart of the woman Andrew loves.

Gardiner's graphic photographs captured the truth about the ghastly nature of modern warfare.