More than once Miss Barton had occasion to meditate on the prayer of Peter offered on the Mount of Transfiguration, that the disciples might be permitted to erect three tabernacles and remain with Jesus and the spirits of the glorified saints. “Lord, it is good to be here,” is the enthusiastic cry of those who, being caught up by the spirit of a noble charity, see no reason why it should not continue permanently. Clara Barton saw to it that her work was discontinued when the need for it had passed.
When she finished her work at Johnstown, she was requested by the lumber dealers not to give away miscellaneously the material which had been used in the erection of her temporary Red Cross buildings. Times were returning to normal; there was employment at good wages for every one who wanted to work; and there was no good reason why people should not buy their lumber or why the lumber business should be demoralized by a thoughtless form of charity. Miss Barton knew that this was good sense. She learned who were the people who really needed and deserved free lumber, and these she assisted; but a portion of the lumber she shipped to Washington and erected at Glen Echo, a few miles out from the city, a permanent home for the American National Red Cross. Here she made her home during the remainder of her life. Now and then she returned for a few weeks to her summer home in Oxford, but the Red Cross Headquarters was where she lived and moved and had her being. There she dwelt and there she died.
It seemed to many to be far from an ideal home for her; it was a bare, barnlike sort of place with two tiers of rooms, the upper tier opening into a gallery as in the cabin of a steamboat. It was erected with reference to use as a possible storehouse and emergency hospital, as well as a central office building for the organization and a shelter for herself and her assistants. One might have expected that a woman who was at heart a tidy housekeeper would have preferred to put her warehouse and office building under one sufficiently ample roof, and to have erected for herself a little cottage adjacent; but Clara Barton lived and died surrounded by all that went into the daily performance of her work.
CLARA BARTON’S SUMMER HOUSE AT OXFORD, MASSACHUSETTS
The author of this volume confesses to a certain chill and sinking of heart when he first saw the interior of the Glen Echo home. He wanted to take Clara Barton out of it and house her in a cozy little place of her own, where for a few hours of the day she could forget the Red Cross and all its cares. But Clara Barton gloried in those undecorated board walls as if they had been palatial. There she hung her diplomas and testimonials from foreign Governments as proudly as though they had been backed by glorious tapestry of cloth of gold. Her sitting-room was at the south of the house, overlooking the Potomac Canal; there she worked late at night and watched the moon as it rode over the tree-tops and reflected itself in the water. From the windows of her bedroom just above, she habitually witnessed the sunrise. Her narrow bed was a soldier’s cot, and beside it was a little table with a candle, a pad of paper and a pencil. If, as often happened, she lay awake in the night, she did not fret over her insomnia, but lighted her candle, propped herself in bed, wrote down the good thoughts that came to her, and then blew out the candle and went to sleep, and was refreshed for work at five o’clock the next morning.
But there was a certain appropriateness in the construction of the Glen Echo home. One might look down from the bare walls that had seen service in Johnstown to find his feet on a rug presented by a Turkish Pasha; he searched the room in vain for relics, as such, for Clara Barton had no fondness for dust-gathering mementoes, but he could not fail to see about him inconspicuous trophies from hard-won fields of service. There was no luxury, but there was a simple, homely comfort in the air of the place. The main hall of the building was two stories high, with a gallery around the upper tier of rooms. It was a place for service, and that service was the joy and glory of her life.
Glen Echo is on the banks of a canal along the Potomac, about eight miles from the Capitol in Washington. This site she selected for herself in 1890, but did not occupy it until 1897. Her reasons for building there were that the location gave her convenient access to Washington, with ample space and freedom for outdoor life and opportunity for storage of Red Cross supplies without the excessive cost which an adequate building would have required in Washington.
At the time she erected her home, a Chautauqua Assembly was in operation in Glen Echo, and her house adjoined the grounds. Indeed, her home was almost one of the Chautauqua buildings, the front being of native stone such as was used in the construction of the large auditorium and Hall of Philosophy which stood within a stone’s throw of her house. But the stone front which was the one picturesque feature of the house gave it a prison-like chill on the inside and had to be removed, and the Chautauqua Assembly itself went down and gave place to a summer amusement park. Spite of the changes in the environment, Clara Barton kept her home at Glen Echo. A Ferris wheel was erected at her front door; the roller-coaster went thundering by her window; the dancing in what had been the auditorium kept up till a late hour; and the goddess of folly with cap and bells superseded divine philosophy in the hall dedicated to the latter; but Clara Barton lived and died in her home in Glen Echo.
The inside of her house was not much more luxurious than the outside. Few homes have been erected with so little attempt at display, or with such modest provision for reasonable comfort.