Celebrating Incredible Women of Culpeper, VA – Clara Barton (Clarissa Harlowe Barton)
March 10, 2025 Things to Do
This month’s second spotlight in our Incredible Women of Culpeper series is Clara Barton.
Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross, performed her first field duty at the Battle of Cedar Mountain. Historians consider Cedar Mountain to be the opening salvo (assault) of the Second Manassas Campaign. This was one of Clara Barton’s first official field duties.
In August 1862, Clara Barton rode her wagon full of supplies to a field hospital by the Cedar Mountain battlefield in Virginia. She showed up in the middle of the night, and to the surgeon there, it seemed like a miracle. He later wrote: “I thought that night if heaven ever sent out a[n]. . . angel, she must be one.”
Barton later wrote of Cedar Mountain: “Five days and nights with three hours sleep, a narrow escape from capture, and some days of getting the wounded into hospitals at Washington. And if you chance to feel that the positions I occupied were rough and unseemly for a woman, I can only reply that they were rough and unseemly for men.”
Sources:
https://www.hallowedground.org/site-locations/cedar-mountain-battlefield/
