Clara Barton, Daughter, 1862–1912.
Flora S. Chapin, Secretary and Daughter, 1912——.
Miss Carrie E. Cutter, delicate and accomplished, was known as the Florence Nightingale of the Twenty-first. She was the daughter of Calvin E. Cutter, surgeon of the regiment; died in the service as nurse, March 24, 1862. Aged, nineteen years and eight months. Mrs. Flora S. Chapin is the daughter of Reverend Charles E. Simmons Hospital Steward in the Civil War, under Surgeons Calvin E. Cutter and James Oliver, of the Twenty-first Massachusetts Regiment. Clara Barton was the daughter of non-commissioned officer Stephen Barton. He enlisted in 1793, serving three years in the Indian wars (1793–97), and later was known by his friends as “Captain Barton.”
Clara Barton, then a war nurse and nearly forty-one years of age, was made Daughter of the Regiment on the battlefield of Antietam, in October, 1862. This was a few days after President Lincoln had reviewed the Army of the Potomac, the review occurring October third. The army at that time numbered about 145,000 men. It was towards nightfall, and the regiment was on dress parade. “She made a little speech,” says Comrade James Madison Stone, “and there was cemented a friendship begun under fire which was destined to last to the end of the lives of all the participants.”
Says Captain Charles F. Walcott of the Twenty-first Regiment (afterward Brigadier-General), and the author of the history of the regiment: “Our true friend, Miss Barton, a Twenty-first woman to the backbone, was now permanently associated with the regiment and, with two four-mule covered wagons which by her untiring efforts she kept well supplied with delicacies in the way of food and articles of clothing, was a ministering angel to our sick. General Sturgis kindly ordered a detail from the regiment of drivers and assistants about her wagon. And this true, noble woman, never sparing herself nor failing in her devotion to our suffering men, always maintained her womanly dignity, and won the lasting respect and love of our officers and men.”
Clara Barton’s last message to the regiment was delivered forty-five years after the Civil War, through an address and original poem, she then being eighty-nine years of age. The occasion was the annual reunion of the regiment, the date August 23, 1910; the reunion held at Worcester, Massachusetts.
REUNION OF 21ST MASSACHUSETTS REGIMENT
Picture taken on the occasion of the annual reunion of the Twenty-first Massachusetts Regiment Association—on August 23, 1921—Sixtieth anniversary of the day the Regiment left Worcester for the field.
On Fame’s eternal camping-ground