Clara Barton
1821 - 1912
Barton, Clarissa Harlowe (Clara Barton), philanthropist, founder of the American Red Cross Society. During the Armenian massacres of 1896 she sailed to Turkey with five assistants and actively took part in the relief effort.
TELEGRAM & GAZETTE (Massachusetts)
January 9, 2006 Monday
SOUTH COUNTY EDITION
Shedding new light on Clara Barton;
Effort to delve deeper into her life
by Jean Laquidara Hill, TELEGRAM & GAZETTE STAFF
OXFORD
In 1896, when Clara Barton was 75 years old, she led a small contingent of Red Cross workers to one of the most volatile places in the world at the time, the Ottoman Empire, where famine had taken hold and Armenians were being obliterated.
The story, and many others that have not been widely told, are being collected as part of an effort to unearth all there is to know about Clara Barton, and to adapt her birthplace museum into a bright center of ever-growing education.
Born in Oxford, Barton taught in the town for 20 years, starting when she was 17 years old, and then went on to other careers.
"In the 1890s there was partly a famine in what was then the Ottoman Empire, but also there was a very visible persecution of the Armenian Christians by the Muslim Turks, and although it's forgotten about today, it was front page news in the 1890s that the Ottoman government was committing horrible acts and the word genocide was used," Emily Thomas, an adjunct professor of history at Nichols College, said yesterday as she told stories and answered questions about Clara Barton.
Ms. Thomas was among volunteers at the Clara Barton Birthplace Museum during the annual open house. The event, which attracted steady crowds, is held about this time every year to honor Barton, who was born on Christmas Day in 1821.
A petite and shy child, Clarissa Harlowe Barton was the youngest of five children. She did not do well in school, according to another volunteer, Jennifer White-Dobbs, who is Barton's great-great-great-great-great-niece and chairwoman of the board of governors for the Clara Barton Birthplace Museum.
Still, said Ms. Thomas, Barton grew up to be a dynamic force among world leaders when she needed to be.
"So in 1896, Clara led a small group of Red Cross volunteers to help the Armenians. Apparently the government, the Ottoman government, did not want the Red Cross there, even though they had signed the Geneva Treaty," Ms. Thomas said. She said Barton had to assure Ottoman government officials that she would act as an unbiased volunteer, assisting everyone, regardless of political affiliation or accusations. It was a very tricky political situation."
Extending a helping hand was somehow ingrained in Barton's character, even though she came from a well-to-do family, Ms. Thomas said. She theorized that Barton learned some of her empathy from her mother, who was involved in charitable activities, and her father, who donated significant sums of money to causes.
Barton could have related to the people left stunned and homeless by the most recent hurricanes, especially the people too poor to afford a means of escape before the storm struck, Ms. Thomas said. In about 1883 a hurricane and tidal wave struck South Carolina. Most of the affected residents were black people, many of whom were former slaves, Ms. Thomas said.
"The same thing happened in Galveston, Texas," Ms. Thomas said about a hurricane that hit the island city in 1900. "That actually was her last relief effort," said Ms. Thompson, explaining it as the last one that Barton participated in, but not necessarily the last one she helped organize.
"Again, most of the affected were African Americans," Ms. Thomas said. She said Barton's concept of assistance was to get people back on their feet as soon as possible, which meant getting people jobs and job training.
"Get people working again. Get the normal cycles of life back," she said.
She said Barton would do anything to help people get their lives back, including cleaning the mess left by the hurricane in Galveston that killed 6,000 people.
One of the challenges in that hurricane aftermath and the one in South Carolina, Ms. Thomas said, was that the white residents who were less affected did not want to assist the black residents. For Barton, who was a friend of Frederick Douglass, color did not matter, only need mattered, Ms. Thomas said.
The new stories and old ones will be told in the coming months as a historian hired under a grant completes her research and the stories are made available to the volunteers, according to Ms. White-Dobbs.
Some of the stories will be told amid artifacts accented by modern lighting in some rooms of the museum, Clara Barton Museum Director and Curator Cathy Woods said yesterday. Ms. Woods said funds from the Quinebaug-Shetucket National Heritage Corridor, the Hyde/Dexter-Russell Charitable Fund, the Stoddard Charitable Trust of Worcester and the George H. and Sybil Fuller Foundation of Worcester have paid for new lighting that makes it possible to clearly see exhibits and artifacts while not damaging fragile documents.
She said the new electrical work also provides additional outlets for setting up visual displays.
The new lighting will allow a host of new education programs, according to Deborah M. Perron, whose family paid for the invitations and other expenses incurred in hosting yesterday's open house in memory her parents.
Mrs. Perron, who is the daughter of former Grafton police chief James Kearnan, and Sally (Pieklik) Kearnan, sponsored the event with her three sisters, Cheryl Simmler of Oxford, Maureen Clark, who is the town clerk of Grafton, and Kate Kearnan of California, who did not attend yesterday's event.
Mrs. Perron said she became a member of the board of governors for the Clara Barton Birthplace Museum after volunteering for years for the museum's owner, the Barton Diabetes Education Center, because of her belief that people need to learn about Barton and see her as a role model.
"She was a strong, positive woman. As a child she was shy but she was incredible. She accomplished things that were unheard of back in the 1800s," Mrs. Perron said.
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