Of Wars and Wallpaper

Image of the outside of Clara Barton's house.

Chris Shaw

You step through a dust-cloaked plate glass door, stand in a postage-stamp shaped square of tile foyer, and it’s not 2010 anymore. Outside, the roar of modern D.C. has “Penn Quarterites” rushing to the Starbuck’s or Jaleo at the opposing corners of Seventh and E Streets. Little do they realize the “Twilight Zone” feel of standing inside that cramped little entry to an entirely different universe– that of Clara Barton’s Civil War era lodgings, up above bustling Seventh and E.

A short step, and your gaze is directed sharply upward. Spreading to two landings and an unseen attic is the narrowest, spookiest stairway this side of the most forlorn story by O. Henry. Except this is our city’s history, and as co-curator Karen Thomassen pointed out to a few of us gawking about (awestruck at the totally untouched 1850s atmosphere of this place), it’s likely these are the last authentic boarding-house rooms left anywhere in Washington, D.C.! As some more illustrious visitors murmured their wonderment and their thanks to the Clara Barton historical site’s sponsor– the Museum of Civil War Medical History– this writer wandered around dusty, dark and obscure corners of Miss Barton’s odd but important world.

What did I find? Well, the most weird and beautiful artifacts were probably undisturbed leafings from a ripped “Harper’s Weekly” from the year 1858; shiny-as-new pen nibs used for correspondence, and striped, flocked and blue-and-gold foot rails of Victorian wallpaper.

Yes, that’s right, you heard me the first time. Wallpaper– a major interior design plus for rooming houses of the period around the time of the Civil War. Of course, it was helpful that some history buffs have ripped away some of the flocked plaster where the decorative paper was originally set. Now, all can observe the crude “balloon frame” laths (thin strips of raw wood) that comprise the sections of wall. As I stumbled through a scrim of dust motes dating from Lord-knows-when, I kept my throat cool and clear with some decidedly refreshing and non-alcoholic version of ‘Granny’s apple cider punch,’ and a snickerdoodle cookie or two.

I may have jumped a couple of inches when a grizzled amateur historian with a rough looking grayish-yellow beard and a squashed leather visored cap tapped me on the shoulder. “Whose side are ya on, Reb or Yank?”, I thought of posing the question, but I shut that thought off the better for asking this man, named Bill, “Say, sir– did Clara Barton have any neighbors up here in this roost of hers?”

As I awaited Bill’s answer, I glommed on to a narrow, miniature door with an opaque glazed panel. Was this just an antique water closet, or perhaps the gateway to Alice In Wonderland’s mad tea party? Or did some Civil War spies turn their cryptic decoder wheel within this chamber? I started once again as Bill growled, “Say, boy, did you know her only adjacent lodger was a gent who worked as a reporter for the Pennsylvania Avenue– on Newspaper Row!”

Gadzooks , I mused. The Associated Press! AP! Up and running in Civil War days. With kindly Clara Barton listing the missing and gathering up supplies for the wounded! Naturally, the townhouse where Samuel F.B. Morse sent the first wire message has long been demolished. I believe Walt Whitman dwelt briefly in the same place, but isn’t it so that the chamber in the Old Tariff Building was diagonally across from the dark and drafty space where I now stood can be found to this day, though today it’s part of the HOTEL MONACO? The first words transmitted by Mr. Morse were, “WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT!!” And now we may hop, skip, jump and climb up to Clara Barton’s third-floor dispensary and apartments and utterly marvel at the frail magic of bona fide, un-varnished heritage of the real greatness so long hidden behind closed, peeling doors.

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