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 Like
many of us who work in Washington DC, Richard Lyons is a
government employee. He works for the General Services Administration.
At the time, his job was to go through the old, abandoned
buildings on the Pennsylvania Avenue corridor of the city
and prepare them for demolition.
Lyons and his co-workers
would start at the basement of each building and work their
way up, evaluate the site, remove flammable materials, and
prepare each building for destruction. One evening when his
co-worker couldn't stay, Lyons went into a building alone.
Later, as he was about to leave, he didn’t. He felt
he couldn’t. He looked up and was startled when he saw
an opening in the ceiling he hadn’t noticed before.
There was no electricity in the building, but in the dark
he managed to find a ladder and crawled up into what appeared
to be a closed-off third floor. He blindly reached into the
area and the first thing he picked up was a tin sign impressed
with the words, “Missing Soldiers Office, Third Floor.” There
was more. Papers and clothing and shoes all stacked as if
the owner would come by for them at any time. Lyons soon
learned that the original address of this building was 488-1/2
Seventh Street, and an apartment in this building once had
been the home of Clara Barton.
 What
did Lyons do? He told his boss. But his boss didn’t want
to listen and told him that the building would be torn down
no matter what was in it. His boss didn’t know that Lyons
was a life-long Civil War enthusiast. Lyons called the Clara
Barton House in Glen Echo, Maryland. They told him Clara Barton
never lived on Seventh Street. Then, he contacted Antietam National
Battlefield and located Gary
Scott, an architectural historian with the Park Service.
Scott listened.
Scott immediately
called GSA to halt the demolition. By the time he arrived
at the Seventh Street location, much of the material had
been scavenged. Still, Scott recovered over 67 boxes of vintage
1862-1868 newspapers, clothing, letters, and other materials
owned by Clara Barton. He verified the fact that Clara Barton
had lived here with extant letters to friends in which she
described these rooms. Also, by rolls of satin wallpaper
that decorated the walls of the apartment as well as walls
in her subsequent home in Glen Echo.
Scott interviewed
as many previous tenants of the building as he could locate.
None had ever been to the third floor of the building. He
learned that the floor had been closed-off for most of the
20th century. Apparently these things were undisturbed since
approximately 1868, and perfectly preserved, just as if Clara
Barton had left them for Lyons to discover in 1997.
Today, Scott is
working with the Park Service to finalize plans to conserve
and display these items. Lyons is still a carpenter at GSA.
We heard that his boss was promoted.
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