Students Develop Projects In Support Of Clara Barton National Historic Site

A recent collaboration between Georgetown University students and the National Park Service is adding value to the Clara Barton National Historic Site ahead of a proposed rehabilitation project. Students in the class “Hands on DC History: Researching Clara Barton for the NPS,” taught by Dr. Chandra Manning, partnered with NPS to learn about Barton, the 19th century US, and public history while also learning how to do original research. They spent the second half of the semester completing research projects on Barton, which the site plans to incorporate into its physical and digital infrastructure.

The project was borne from planning efforts around the rehabilitation effort at the Clara Barton National Historic Site. Manning, a Civil War historian and professor at Georgetown University, worked as a consulting party on the plans and realized that her students could volunteer for the National Park Service, doing research and completing projects to support the site and the public’s understanding of Barton’s place in history.

The course description points out that Clara Barton, as the founder of the Red Cross, was one of the most significant Americans of the 19^th century. Her home and headquarters of the American Red Cross are managed by the National Park Service in the DC Region.

“The idea is to add more Clara Barton content, to make it more available to the public,” said Kevin Patti, park ranger at Clara Barton National Historic Site. “The reason we do interpretation is to connect people to the site and have them engage with the story of the site.”

At the start of the semester, Patti gave the students a tour of the Clara Barton house and then sat down with them to talk through ideas for their research. Many of the topics he proposed were related to national observational months, including Women's History Month and African American History Month.

“I find in my years of being involved with Clara Barton's story, there are an awful lot of people that don't know [Barton’s] life, her story,” said Patti. “And it's a really good story. It's an inspiring story. It's an interesting story.”

The student projects were meant to help highlight parts of Barton’s story that have, perhaps, fallen through the cracks. Manning said the topics ranged “from Clara Barton as amateur poet to Barton's religious views to Barton's struggles with mental health to Barton's leadership style to Barton's little-known foray into prison reform to the presence of Clara Barton on the cultural memory landscape today.” The formats also varied, with students developing pamphlets, lesson plans, StoryMaps, online exhibits, and more.

Sylvia Jordan, a graduate student at Georgetown, looked at Clara Barton's work in the 1888 Mount Vernon, Illinois, tornado for the course. After struggling to find primary sources, she reached out to the Jefferson County Historical Society in Mount Vernon and received a packet of dozens of primary source materials, including dozens of photographs of the original storm damage.

“It started to click with me that this was a story that could and probably should be told visually,” said Jordan, which led her to develop her project into a StoryMap that will be published on the NPS website. “I didn't expect to find that this was kind of the moment where the Red Cross becomes the Red Cross.”

“I think one of the things that kind of struck me the most is we hear disaster relief and we expect Barton shows up in a helicopter with bulldozers, and she can clean things up very easily,” explained Jordan. “That's not the case. This is still a time when people are doing disaster relief quite literally with horse drawn plows. I wanted [people] to see and connect with the difficulties of disaster relief, but also understand the importance of a nationalized system of disaster relief.”

Beyond the StoryMap, Jordan also hopes to help revamp the Junior Rangers manual and assist with other Junior Ranger projects at the site. When it comes to her Mount Vernon research, she hopes it proves inspirational for those who encounter it.

“We have a saying in my family, ‘No waiting on Superman.’ Don't wait on somebody to solve the problem for you…Be proactive. I think Clara Barton is the idealized example of that,” said Jordan. “And her house, her work with the Red Cross, her work in the Civil War, is a perfect place to learn about that, to exemplify that, to emulate that.”

Fallon Wolfley, a senior at Georgetown and another student in the class, focused on Barton’s poetry and its place in 19^th century American literature.

“During the Civil War, [in the] second half of the 19th century, as Americans are kind of coming to terms with the mass amount of grief that they experienced, they are turning to poetry as a way of making connections between people and sharing personal poems, sharing clippings of poems with each other, writing poetry to each other, and sharing it that way…Barton does that, too,” explained Wolfley.

“Clara Barton is not that great of a poet,” admitted Wolfley, but she also found that was important. “Everything that she did in her life is absolutely incredible…I think it's nice that you have this element of her that's kind of mediocre because then it makes it all those other achievements so much better. You realize that she's a real person, and she was still able to do these incredible things.”

Beyond the course, Wolfley’s project also benefitted from a job she held at the Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office Museum during her freshman year.

“It was interesting learning about Clara Barton as a person…and speaking about public history with the people working [at the museum], what goes into writing a good museum [exhibit], what is expected from the public, and I think that it's informing the way I want to present this project. When you're making a video for the public, it needs to be digestible.”

Wolfley hopes her research will be incorporated as a digital page on the NPS website, and she’s also hoping to develop her work into a mini-documentary next semester. She hopes that her work will help visitors look at Barton “not through her achievements but who she was as a person and how she was interacting with the world around her.”

Emma Vonder Haar, a senior in the course and an intern at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, focused her research on the public memory of Clara Barton, including how her name is used on street signs, stamps, school names, and more.

“There's a crater on Venus named for her. There's a sequoia in California named for her. There's roads from Cuba to Amsterdam named for her,” explained Vonder Haar.

She is developing a StoryMap that will be accessible from the NPS website, as well as a lesson plan to help teachers incorporate it in middle and high school classrooms. The visual element felt important, as it allows visitors to see just how far-reaching Barton’s legacy is.

Vonder Haar said her research pushed her to ask questions that she hopes those who view her StoryMap will engage in, as well. “Who are we celebrating and what does that say about us or about the people who have the power to decide who's being celebrated? Do we see ourselves reflected in those names and street signs, or does it not reflect our current reality? I was hoping to inspire people to think about that and consider the world around them and how they exist in that environment.”

“The lessons I'm going to take from Clara Barton are how she didn't ask for permission to do things,” explained Vonder Haar. “If she saw a problem, she just went and fixed it and wasn't waiting for another institution to come in…Think about your legacy, think about how legacies are celebrated around us. And then, what can we do to honor Clara Barton's legacy?”

A symposium on December 6 showcased the students’ work at the Glen Echo Spanish Ballroom next to the Clara Barton house. “It went off very well,” said Patti.

“It was really exciting to see how many community visitors showed up and were excited to learn more about Clara Barton and to celebrate her work,” said Vonder Haar. “As a student scholar, it’s really exciting to see people supporting our work, too.”

Both Patti and Manning feel the course was a success and hope to repeat the collaboration in future semesters.

“[The students] demonstrated that the basic structure of the class—a research seminar partnered with a local institution or organization in which undergraduate students do research of use and benefit to that institution—can work when local institutions tell us what they need and want, and student energy, ingenuity, and talent goes to serving those needs and wants while also providing outstanding experiences for the students,” said Manning.

“It's something that we've already talked about repeating in years to come,” said Patti.

Ultimately, the student research will add value to Clara Barton National Historic Site, offering the public more opportunities to learn about her life and work.

“Our national parks tell us about our leaders like Clara Barton,” said Patti. “They tell us about our struggles. They tell us about our wars, our battles. They tell us about our victories. These national parks tell us about us as a country. And so, by having more information about one of the parks, we have more that people can engage with and learn from. And they grow as people by learning this. It helps the park, yes, but it also helps the people.”