pair of bronze base reliefs. one depicts him receiving his senatorial oath of office from vice president chester author, even though he took office two years before author assumed the vice presidency. taking a liberal view of historical accuracy, mrs. logan explained it by saying she'd merely chosen prominent men to choose on his memorial. easier to build a myth than a monument. 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 in her missing soldiers office where they received over 60,000 letters from families searching for lost sons and husbands. in 1986, richard lyon 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 soldiers office and hear the story about richard lyons who worked alone for months to save the building from demolition. >> hi, i'm susan rosenbald and i work in frederick, maryland, and i have a great project i'm working of, it's clara barton's missing soldiers office, she lived here during 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 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 bannister that clara used every day when she came to and from her boardinghouse room. the first floor of the building was always a store until 1993. there was a shoe store in there. and then the second floor was either professional space, offices or maplaces for people o on the first floor would live that owned the stores. so, after a while they never used the third floor. and so they actually, you know, 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. and so they -- because this was old and dilapidated, they

decided they wanted to demolish it so that a developer could come in and build something new. but once they discovered the things in the attic on the third floor, they decided that 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. so, when you walk up the staircase and put your hand on the bannister, you're walking in clara barton's footsteps. she did this for about eight years during the civil war era and just after when she operated a missing soldiers office in the 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 that she couldn't find these three sets of stairs anymore, so she ended

up moving out late in december of 1868. and it'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 boardinghouse room. one of the really cool things that we found in here is this blue wallpaper down here at the bottom 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 patterned wallpaper that we expect to have replicated with the same techniques that it would have been made with in the 1850s. and another really interesting thing, it's one of my favorites, is this holder back here.

this is, if you take this away, this shelf has two holes in it, and it's the earliest form of a fire extinguisher for boardinghouses. what they did was they had two holes in a shelf. 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 to the hallway, grab the bucket and run in and throw it on the fire, so after that, of course, we eventually get to a modern fire extinguisher that is a spray and it didn't really get 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 the 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 roll, one through five, so that we can show people exactly all the names and exactly what kind of work she was doing during that period of time. this roll was sent out to newspapers all over the united states. and printed -- and placed in the newspapers along with this little note right up and the note just explains to the readers that what they need to do is if they have any information about any of the men on this his, 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 boardinghouse is that it had installed gas lighting 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 fragments of some of those gas lights. we're going to try to replicate those as the museum moves forward and the restoration takes mactake s place. we are moving into clara's missing soldiers office. she started out in this one room. and i've read an account from 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 edward shaw moved out of the building. he had gotten to be rather elderly. and 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 1911, and as far as we know, no one ever occupied the space after that. >> my name is richard lapp, i work for the general services administration as a carpenter. in 1996 they sent us out to the buildings that we acquired for pennsylvania avenue 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 then 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 wr so, strangely as it happened, i made my way up the steps. i got up here. there's nothing in here. no lights, no nothing. a little bit of light coming through the windows. and i walked in here and i heard some noise in the back, uh-oh, somebody's back there. so, i go back there, shine the flashlight around. nothing there. so i'm looking around in each room. and i hear the noise over here

again. so there's nothing here. so, i did this four times. about the fourth time i was over there i tripped over this ladder leaned up against the wall. so, i came over here and looked around and 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 ran a red light and bumped fenders, and i'm standing there watching to see what happens, and from out of nowhere, don't know what it was, but it felt like somebody 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 seen an envelope hanging between the ceiling and the wall, about two inches down.

about right there. so, i says, well, i can't reach it, so i go back and i bring this ladder out here. and i put it there. i tried to pull it down. it was tight. so, there was a hole right here. these boards here were laid out like a floor up there. all leveled off and everything. i pulled myself up to the little hole, and on my hands and knees, i put my hand on a piece of metal. so, i pick it up and move it out of the way so i get over to where the envelope was. and when i turned it over, it said missing soldiers office, third story, room nine, miss clara barton. so, that was the thrill of the day. still is. and i shone the light back in there, there was utensils, clothing, newspapers, newspapers

from 1859 up to 1868. had the whole account of the civil war. funeral bunting. what i think is funeral bunting. there's 100 yards rolled up. here's a piece of it in the window. sometimes things fall out of the ceiling or comes down to the noor and floor and i pick it up and throw it in there. i didn't really know what to do. i said, well, i'll pack up some of this stuff and hide it, so i will come back on monday, so i came back on monday and i happened to run in to one of the project managers out front and i asked him about it. what they was going to do with it. oh, we're going to tear it down. i says, well, why? he says, well, we don't need it. i said, well, what are you going to do? these two buildings were built the same. he said, we're going to keep that building.

he said duke ellington performed there when he was a young man. duke ellington is a pretty well-known person but this building i found some stuff in there that relates to a very important time in our history to a very important person. and he turned, he says, as white as he could, i thought he was going to pass out. he said go rid of it. don't go to the gsa with it, get rid of it. i took it upon myself to do what i did, going 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 address 488 7th street. then i realized, well, i need some help here. so i went to somebody that knew about washington. asked them questions, oh, you

got to go to the library and get some of the hold records and look at them, so i did. and it had clara barton lived here. that's how i got lost was in 1870 they changed the address to 437. because the numbers never matched up and then they changed it to 437. and then i was sure. i called people all over country. i set up a post office become, answering machine, i was calling people all over the country trying on get them to buy this building. well, at first they had detectives all over the place trying to find this fella ed. we had a contractor electrician named ed, they hounded him.

so, you know, and i happened to, you know, be reading an article from the "battlefield journal" in september and they were dedicated a monument to chalara barton and i called and i talked to a man about it and told him what it was, what i'd found, and he was very interested in it. he said, well, i have to talk to my wife. she's an expert on clara. so, for a week we exchanged 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, well, what did you tell him? i just told him 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'll send them to you. he gave me the address down there on ohio drive. at the time he was the head historian for washingthis torian in washington for the park service. and no sooner than he got that stuff and he called me back, that's got to be the real thing. when can i see it? he made an appointment with gsa to get in here. gary saved the building from getting torn down. if not for 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, this door right here. this is door number nine, and it associated with the missing soldiers office. clara talks about being in room

number nine quite a bit in her diaries that are 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 talked about having this mail slot cut in there. she paid a carpenter to come out. she paid 50 cents, and she needed this mail slot because she was receiving hundreds and hundreds of letters a day. i'm sure she was not the postal service's favorite person at that time because of that amount. 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 unmarked 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 family 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 of 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 of those soldiers, many of whom were in very bad condition to a camp outside of annapolis, maryland. and so she proposed to -- senator henry wilson that she go out to the camp 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, and 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, had they really didn't have time for. president lincoln, of course,

knew better than that. he now how overwhelmed they w e were, so he actually put an ad in or notice in the newspapers that said if you have any information about missing soldiers or our need of information about someone that you're missing, please contact miss clara barton on 7th street in washington, d.c., and then signed at the bottom abraham lincoln. so, she had the support from, you know, the big man up there at the very top and there wasn't really very much the army could do about keeping her away. so, she did go to annapolis. eventually all of these soldiers were rehabilitated and sent home, so they closed the camp. and so naturally she just moved her office right here into d.c., into the living space that she had. you know, it was just a 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 to give her a budget. she never was able to do that until about 1868 when congress voted to reimburse her for 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 inquiry on went in a book, eventually went on a roll that was published in you at papers. there were five rolls altogether. and she answered, you know, every family member, every correspondent as best she could with whatever information that she had.

unfortunately, you know, 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, and so clara actually worked on that case herself. the other one was a letter from a family, and i can't remember where they are 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 that he didn't understand why clara felt the need to publish his name in all of 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 stating 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 and, 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 and, of course, it says missing soldiers office, third story, room nine, miss clara barton, so that would have been hanging on the outside of the building to identify it for people who went looking for miss barton's office. some of the really, really interesting finds that we got in attic were socks. we found many, many socks, 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, and 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. 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 toes, that kind of thing. you could reuse the top and throw away the bottom part. so, she would have gathered up as much as those as possible so that she could join new sock tops to new -- or old sock tops

to new sock bottoms and then those socks could be used again. very conservative way to look at things. and 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. and i think that's one of the best finds that we can have because i personally have never seen dirty footprinted mud and blood and torn-up socks from the civil war before. i think that's really a great find. well, 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 sanitary commission. 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 soldier, the common soldier fighting a war. it's also a rubberized shelter hasp. now, there are plenty of rubberized materials left from the civil war, but rubberized cloth and especially shelter hats are very, very hard to come by. this is the only known rubberized shelter hasp in existence that we know of at this time. you can see here the rope is still on the ends of it. and it was first presented as a rubberized oilcloth or just an oilcloth. so, when i looked at it for the first time and i saw the buttonholes along the one side and the ropes still in the hand

sewn grommets on the ends, then i realized it was actually a shelter hasp. very, very few of these were produced during the war. even more significantly was how many had the sanitary stamp on those. and so it also 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, and, 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 but it is quite a find. 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 historic architectural firm. they've had wallpaper studies

done and sock study done. some of the artifacts have been studied by professionals a little bit to just give some clarification on those. and, 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 doing fund-raising because gsa has a limited amount of funds to do the restoration, conservation work and we hope to be able 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 artifacts that we have are desperately in need of conservation work. i would say that this is tremendous, it's almost a miraculous find. certainly it's a miracle that it was able to survive and end up being preserved and is now on its way to being a museum.

so, it's really an extraordinary space. general services administration believes that this is the only 19th century boardinghouse space that has been preserved like this in washington, d.c. so, part of the museum process will be including interpretation about the boardinghouses 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 boardinghouses 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, you know, december 2012 to january 2013, and we hope that this will keep people's interest while the work