Civil War History Programs with the Resident Associates Program
past articles

Vol. 1

Vol. 2

Vol. 3

Vol. 4

Vol. 5

Vol. 6

Vol. 7

Vol. 8

Vol. 9

Vol. 10

Antietam Arlington assassination Barton baseball Bearss Booth cemetery Chancellorsville Confederate Davis Douglass Ellet emancipation engineer freedom general Gettysburg Grant Jackson Lee Lincoln Manassas Mary Maryland McClellan Mudd monument museum Petersburg railroad Richmond river slavery Smithsonian statue telegraph Union Mt.Vernon veteran Virginia Washington women

Study Leader Profile - Gary Scott

The Smithsonian Associates Civil War E-Mail Newsletter, Volume 1, Number 3

Gary Scott is a National Park Service researcher, lecturer, and architectural historian. He received his BA from Southwestern University, MA from the University of North Carolina, and has taught extensively.

Recently, his talents and expertise were called upon to verify items found in a building which appeared to have been used by Clara Barton after the Civil War as an office to locate missing soldiers. The office building, originally scheduled for demolition, is located in downtown Washington DC. Gary was able to identify records found in a crawl space of this building, and verified that they indeed belonged to Clara Barton.

Among these items were the actual lists of the names of missing soldiers that she compiled, Civil War era newspapers, 19th-century wallpaper remnants, clothing, and other Civil War period artifacts. Barton's efforts eventually enabled her to go to Andersonville and identify and mark many of the graves of the over 13,000 prisoners who died there. Just as Clara Barton identified the missing soldiers, Gary Scott identified these records which had been lost.

Share/Save/Bookmark