captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2008 . between 1861 and 1868, clara barton known as the angel of the battlefield and founder of the american red cross lived in this washington, d.c. building. she employed 12 clerks on the third floor of her missing soldiers office. where they received over 60,000 letters for families searching for lost sons and husband. in 1996, richard lyons, a carpenter for the general services administration was helping to prepare the building for demolition when he discovered this office sign in the attic. "american history tv" visited the building on 7th street to learn about the missing soldier's office and to hear the story of richard lyons who worked alone for months to save the building from demolition.

hi ix i'm susan rosen vald i work for the ashland museum in frederick, maryland. i have a great project i'm working on id like to give you a little tour of. it's going to be clara barton's missing soldiers office. she lived here in the civil war and this is where she got her start in humanitarian relief. here we are inside the space where clara lived during the civil war. this part right here was last renovated in about 1910. as we go up the original staircase, starting at about the second floor landing, it's all original, the actual wood steps and banister that claire used every day when she came to and from her boarding house room. the first floor of the building was always a store until 1993. there was a shoe store in there. then the second floor was either

professional space, offices or places for the people who on the first floor would live, that owned the stores. so after awhile, they never used the third floor. and so they actually quarantined -- they blocked off the whole floor so no one could even get up there. so it's pretty much the way it was when general services administration discovered what this building was when they were getting ready to demolish the building. the general services administration wanted to sell many of the buildings on this block that they had owned, so they -- because this was old and dilapidated, they decided they wanted to dell mom lish it so a developer could come in and build something new. but once they discovered the things in the attic on the third floor, they decided the space was so historically important that they wanted to save the space instead of destroy it and build something new.

this is the original staircase that clara used that has never been renovated or changed much at all, just a few repairs done to it. when you walk up the stair case and put your hand on the banister, you're walking in clara barton's footsteps. she did this for about eight years during the civil war rear and just after when she operated a missing soldiers office in this space, and eventually she ended up leaving because her health became so poor and she was so exhausted from the work she had done during the war, she couldn't climb these three sets of stairs anymore. she ended up moving out late in december of 1868. that's pretty much when she closed down her operations here in washington. so we're going to go down the hallway. this is the original stairwell, and she would have walked this

every day to get to and from her boarding house room. one of the really cool things that we found in here is this blue wallpaper here at the bottom. it was covered up by floorboard. we believe that's the original wallpaper. and in the restoration project, we're hoping to replace all of the damaged paper or lack of paper in this room with that pat terp wall paper that we expect to have replicated with the same techniques it would have been made with in the 1850s. and another really interesting thing is one of my favorites, is this holder back here. this is -- if you take this away, the shelf has two holes in it. it's the earliest form of a fire extinguisher for boarding houses. what they did was they had these two holes in a self. they would have leather buckets that sat down in here that were

full of sand because every room had some kind of fire-driven stove, whether it was coal or wood. then they would need this in case the place caught on fire, any of the occupants could run out into the hallway, grab the bucket and run in and throw it on the fire. after that, ouf course, we're vechbtly get to a modern fire extinguisher that is a spray. it didn't really take them too long to get there. but these are very difficult to find. so now we're in the hallway. one of the neat things that we have, we found in this space that we had replicated is a roll of the missing men. clara had five of these produced during the war, sent out almost 100,000 copies. and we only know of a handful in existence today. so one of the goals of my museum is to find copies of each role, one through five, so we can show

people exactly the names and exactly what kind of work she was doing during that period of time. this role was september out to newspapers all over the united states and placed in the newspapers along with this little notoriety up here. and the note just explains to the readers that what they need to do, if they have any information about any of the men on this list, they should send the information to clara barton. this is the space that she would have lived in. one of the nice things about this boarding house is that it had installed gaslighting in the hallways above the doors and in each of the boarding rooms. so you can see, when we go into the next room, the pipes, the gas pipes are still hanging down that held the original gas lights. and we have some frag s of some of those gas lights. we're going to try to replicate those as the museum moves

forward and the restoration work takes place. so we're walking right now into the space that was originally -- well, eventually clara's missing soldiers office. she started out in just one room, and i have read an account for one of her family members who visited her here who said that she had one room. she divided that room in half because she started to collect supplies for soldiers and she needed so much space that she put this wall up you see in the background, and that was her boarding room. half of it was used to store supplies. the other half was her living space which was really quite small for the time. the last time we know anyone inhabited this space on the third floor was in 1911. that's when the original lessee, edward shaw moved out of the building. he had gotten to be rather elderly. he went, left this building and

moved in some smaller space. i'm not sure where yet. he's one of the very intriguing personalities that we're researching right now to find out exactly what his role was, his relationship with clara barton. so he did move out in 1911. as far as we know, no one ever occupied the space after that. >> my name is richard lyons i work with the general services administration as a carpenter. in 1996 they sent us to the buildings that we acquired from the new development corporation to clean them up, make sure nobody was living in them. it was the day before thanksgiving in '96. me and a co-worker came here. we started in the basement, the first floor.

and the second floor, by that time he wanted to go back to the shop, it was about 10:30. he went back to the shop and i was going to stay because i didn't want to come back here on a monday. so strangely as it happened, i made my way up the steps, and i got up here, you know, just nothing in here. no lights, no nothing. only little bit of light coming through the windows. i walked in here and heard some noise in the back. uh-oh, somebody is back there. i went back there and shined my flashlight around, nothing there. so i'm walking around in each room, and i hear the noise over here again. so there's nothing here. i did this four times. about the fourth time i was there, i tripped over this latter leaning up against the wall. i came over here and look

around, nothing was here. so i happened to witness -- you don't usually witness one, but i witnessed an accident out here in the intersection. somebody run a red light and bumped fenders. i'm standing there watching to see what happens. and from out of know where, i don't know what it was. but it felt like someone tapped me on the shoulder. i thought it was a co-worker. i turned around. wasn't nobody there. so when i turned back around to look out the window, i turned around like this, and the corner of my eye, i seen an envelope hanging between the ceiling and the wall about two inches down, about right there. well, i can't reach it. so i go back and bring this ladder out here, and i put tlit and tried to pull it down.

it was tight. there was a hole right here. these boards right here were laid out like a floor up there, all leveled off and everything. i pulled myself up through the little hole. i'm on my hands and knees i. put my hand on a piece of metal. i pick it up to move it out of the way so i can get over to where the envelope was. when i turned it over, it read "missing soldiers office, third story, room nine, ms. clara barton." so that was a thrill of the day. still is. i shined the light back in there and there was utensils, clothing, newspapers -- newspapers from 1859 up to 1868. they had the whole account of the civil war in them i imagine. funeral daunting, what i think is funeral daunting. there's hundreds of yards of it rolled up. here is a piece of it here in

the window. sometimes things fall out of the ceiling or comes up out of the floor, and pick it up and throw it in there. didn't really know what to do. i said, well, i'll pack up some of this stuff and hide it. i will come back on monday. so i came back on monday and then i happened to run into one of the project managers out front and i asked him about it. what they were going to do with the building. oh, we're going to tear it down. i said, well, why? he said, well, we don't need it. i said, what are you going to do -- these two buildings were built the same. he said, no, we're going to keep that building. duke ellington performed there when he was a young man. i said duke ellington is a pretty well-known person, but this building, i found some stuff in there that relates to have a very important time in our history, to a very important

person. and he turned as white as he could. i thought he was going to pass out. he said, get rid of it, don't go to the gsa with it. so i took it upon myself to do what i did. i went to the library of congress for about nine months every evening and did research. what threw me off was the address. everything i found here was addressed 488 1/2 7th street. then i realized, well, i need some help here. so i went to somebody that knew about washington and asked some questions. oh, you got to go to the library and get some of the old records and look at that. so i did. it had clara barton lived here. that's how this got lost when in 1870 they changed the address to

437 because the numbers never matched up. they changed it to 437. then i was sure. i called people all over the country. i set up a post office box, and ed shaw's name and answering machines. i was calling people all over the country trying to get him to buy this building. well, at first we had detectives all over the place trying to find this fellow ed. we had a contractor electrician named ed. they hounded him. and i happened to be reading an article from the battlefield journal in september, and they were dedicating a monument to clara barton, and i called and

teethal battlefield and i talked to a man about it and told him what it was, what i found. he was very interested in it. he said, i have to talk to my wife. she's an expert on clara. for a week we changed messages. then one morning my wife called me at work. she says, there's a man from the park service named gary scott that wants to talk to ed shaw. i said, what did you tell him? he said, i'd have him to call you. so i called him. he wanted to know about the artifacts and everything. and i told him. at first he didn't believe me. i said, i'll tell you what i'll do. i'll go make xerox copies and i send them to you. give me the address. he gave me the address there down in ohio. at that time he was a head historian here in washington for the park service.

no sooner than he got that stuff, he called me back and said, that's got to be the real thing, that's got to be the real thing, can i see it? he made arrangements with gsa to come in here. gary saved the building from getting torp down. i remember him. i don't think we'd be standing here today. one of my favorite artifacts in the building and i think one of the best is this door right here. this is door number nine, and it is associated with the missing soldiers office. clara talks about being in room number nine quite a bit in her diaries located at the library of congress and a few other places. one of the really extraordinary things about the door is that in her diary she talks about having this mail slot cut in there. she paid a carpenter to come

out. she paid 50 cents. she needed this mail slot because she was receiving hundreds and hundreds of letters a day. i'm sure she was not the postal services favorite person at that time. so during the civil war, the u.s. army was so overwhelmed because this was the first time that they had truly had to conduct a very large-scale war which they were completely unprepared for in every kind of way. soldiers were left on the battlefield in unparked graves. many men were missing. the army was not able to put in the resources to locate where they have been. so clara barton by 1864 was pretty famous internationally and she was known as the angel of the battlefield and the friend of the american soldier. so families started writing to her to ask if she knew anything about the whereabouts of their

loved ones who had been missing sometimes for a couple years. and they were pleading for help which, of course, clara couldn't ignore. she was kind of in a lull at that time between going out to the battlefield. so she was very willing to pick up a new job to do and a new purpose for her. so she started to make inquiries about these. towards the end of the war as the u.s. army was liberating some of the prison camps, they were shipping all those soldiers, many of whom who were in very bad condition up to camp har role outside annapolis, maryland. she proposed to senator henry wilson that she go out to camp har role and start interviewing soldiers and looking through records to see if she couldn't help these families out. people were really very traumatized by the idea that their loved one was just laying

in a field somewhere or in an unmarked grave, so they really needed closure. she recognized the need for this help. she approached henry wilson. he approached president lincoln who said, i'll talk to the war department about it. of course, they came back very unhappy about the idea that a woman was going to come to camp and look through their records and get in their way and ask all kinds of questions which they really didn't have time for. president lincoln, of course, knew better than that. he knew how overwhelmed that they were. so he actually put an ad in or a notice in the newspapers that said, if you have any information about missing soldiers or are in need of information about someone that you're missing, please contact ms. clara barton on 7th street in washington, d.c. and then signed the bottom, abraham

lincoln. she had support from the big man up there at the very top and there wasn't really much the army could do about keeping her away. so she did go to annapolis. eventually all of these paroled soldiers were rehab bill tated and sent home. so they closed camp har role. naturally she moved her office right here into d.c. into the living space that she had. it was jauft natural thing. she had up to 12 clerks at one point working for her. she actually left town quite a bit of the time to go on a speaking tour to raise funds to support the missing soldiers office. she also lobbied congress to make it an official agency and give her a budget. she never was able to do that till about 1868 when congress voted to reimburse her pour the

funding that she put out of her own personal money to get this thing done. she did receive over 63,000 pieces of correspondence. she tried to answer each and every one. a lot of times she set up form letters for her clerks to use and she gave them permission to sign her name, and so every soldier that she received an inquiry on went in a book, eventually went on a roll that was published in all the papers, there were five rolls altogether. she answered every family member, every correspondent as best she could with whatever information that she had. unfortunately a lot of those ended up being, we're sorry we couldn't find any information. but some of them were very interesting. she did get a letter that she answered personally from a woman whose son was an officer and he was missing.

she sent -- the mother sent a beautiful photograph of the son in his uniform that was very compelling. so clara actually worked on that case herself. the other one was a letter from a family -- and i can't remember where they were from, but they had been missing a loved one. so she took the information, put the man's name on one of the rolls that was published and received a letter back from the gentleman himself who said he didn't understand why clara felt the need to publish his name in all the papers, and that he could take care of himself, and he'd let his family know his whereabouts when he was ready to do that. and so she wrote him a very impertinent letter saying that she actually was not very concerned and she felt very bad that his family was concerned about him and that he had caused them so much grief.

by the way, she sent his letter to them along with his whereabouts. so they would at least know what happened to him. this is the original sign that was found identifying the building. it would have been on the outside of the door. of course, it says missing soldiers office, third story, room nine, ms. clara barton. that would have been hanging on the outside of the building to identify it for people looking for ms. barton's office. some of the really, really interesting finds that we got in the attic were socks. we found many, many socks and sock tops and sock bottoms that were separated as well as lots of rags and pieces of cloth. what i love about these is that the soldiers' footprints are still in these socks. you can see this one, it looks

like quite a bit of blood on that sock. clara would have taken these from the hospitals and collected them because socks were at a premium and they would have wanted to reuse as much material as possible. and back in the 19th century, the way you did that was you could separate the top of the sock from the bottom. you can see the bottom is where most of the wear takes place. you've got holes in the heels and toe, that kind of thing. you could reuse the top and throw away the bottom part. so she would have gathered up as much of those as possible so that she could join new sock tops -- old sock tops to new sock bottoms, then those socks could be used again, very conservative way to look at things. i suspect what happened was, when the war was over and she didn't need to be supplying them anymore, she had these left and just never did anything with them.

i think that's one of the best finds that we can have because i personally have never seen dirty fo footprinted, mud and blood and torn up socks from the civil war before. i think that's really a great find. one of the very unique finds from the attic, and i think is most significant is this piece of canvas right here. significant because it has, if you look very closely, u.s. sanitary commission stamp on it which means that it was used by the u.s. sanitary commission. the u.s. sanitary commission was another organization that works side by side with clara who also did a lot of supply to the u.s. army and provided a lot of supplies. they also did inspections and were really soldier advocates for the stoleier, the common soldier fighting in the war. it's las rubberize d shelter

half. there are plenty of materials from the civil war, but rubberized cloth and especially shelter halves are very, very hard to come have. this is the only rubberized shelter half in existence that we know of at this time. you can see here the rope is still in -- on the ends of it, and it was first presented as a rubberized oil cloth or just an oil cloth, but when i looked at it for the first time and saw the buttonholes along the one side and the rope still in the hand-sewn grommets on the end, i realized it was actually a shelter half. very, very few of these were produced during the war. even more significantly with how many had the sanitary stamp on those. and so it lts shows you a little bit about clara barton's

relationship with the sanitary commission because they gave this to her at some point during the war. of course, being such a versatile object, she held on to that so she could use it over and over again. so i'm not really surprised that it was in the collection. it is quite a find. the general services administration with the sale of the building was able to put aside some money to do some of the work, and what they've done is, they have spent money on reconstruction or renovation and conservation plans with a historical architectural firm. they've had wallpaper studies done and sock studies done. some of the artifacts have been studied by professionals a little bit to give clarification on those. of course, they've been out there trying to promote more funding which is where my museum

comes in. we have an official partnership with gsa, and we are actually again doing fund-raising, because gsa has a limited amount of funds to do the restoration conservation work and we are hoping to fill in for whatever they can't do plus build the exhibits and cases for the artifacts and do artifact conservation. some of the art facts that we have are desperately in need of conservation work. i would say that this is a tremendous -- it's almost a miraculous find. certainly it's a miracle that it was able to survive and end up preserved, and it's now on its way to being a museum. it's really not an extraordinary space. general services administration believes this is the only 19th century boarding house space that has been preserved like this in washington, d.c. so part of the museum process will be including interpretation about the boarding houses of

washington, d.c. because many, many of the people who came to washington knew that their time here was probably temporary and didn't want to buy a house or anything. so they would even -- generals and congressmen would actually live in boarding houses instead of renting a house or buying a place in the d.c. area. so these are really pretty -- this is a really pretty significant find. we hope to have a welcome center open on the first floor by the end of this year beginning december 2012 to january 2013. and we hope that this will keep people's interest while the work takes place. and when they come to the museum finally, when it finally opens for tours, they're going to discover clara barton's office just like richard lyons did when he came here in 199. the goal is