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Dromo's Den
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[Up] [Dromo's Den] Clara Barton Biography BARTON, CLARA (1821-1912). An American philanthropist. She was born at Oxford, Mass., was a teacher in early life, and the founder of various free schools in New Jersey. In 1854 she had a clerkship in Washington, but resigned at the beginning of the Civil War and went into hospital service. After the war she originated and carried on, at her own cost, a systematic search for missing soldiers. Going to Europe, she assisted in establishing hospitals in the Franco-German War, followed the German army, and was honored with the Gold Cross of Baden and the Iron Cross of Germany. By her efforts the American Red Cross Society was formed, 1881, and she was its president until 1904. In 1905 she became president of the National First Aid Association. In 1883 she was appointed superintendent and steward of the reformatory prison for women at Sherborn, Mass. In 1884 she represented the United States at the Red Cross Conference and at the International Peace Convention in Geneva. It was her suggestion that led to a change of the rules of the Red Cross Society permitting relief in other calamities than that of war. She superintended relief work in the yellow fever pestilence in Florida (1887), the Johnstown flood (1889), the Russian famine (1891), among the Armenians (1896), in the Spanish-American War (1898), and in the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902). The last work of which she took personal direction was the relief of sufferers from the flood at Galveston in 1900. She wrote a History of the Red Cross (1883), History of the Red Cross in Peace and War (1898), Story of the Red Cross (1904), Story of my Childhood (1907). Consult Adams and Foster, Clara Barton," in Heroines of Modern Progress (1913). The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. II (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 725. |