In 1865, Clara Barton traveled to the site of the notorious Confederate prison camp in Andersonville, Georgia, where she endeavored to name the missing and the dead.
The future founder of the American Red Cross also collected their relics—whittled spoons, woven reed plates, a piece from the prison’s “dead line,” a tattered Bible—and brought them back to her Missing Soldiers Office in Washington, DC, presenting them to politicians, journalists, and veterans’ families before having them photographed together in an altar-like arrangement.
