72. Clara Barton Insurance Documents
The papers of the Mutual Fire Insurance Company of Montgomery County (1848-1962) include policy #23040 for Clara Barton (1821-1912) for the years 1892-94. She had become the first president of the American Red Cross in 1881 (serving until 1904) in a meeting in her I Street apartment in Washington. This policy, however, predated her moving into the Glen Echo home (now a National Park Service site) where she lived from 1897 and died in 1912.
As a copyist for the U.S. Patent Office in Washington in 1861, Barton had nursed 40 men of the 6th Massachusetts Militia injured in the Baltimore Riot of April 19. Afterwards, she began collecting food and clothing for the Union troops. In August 1862, she was given permission to work the front lines, earning the nickname “Angel of the Battlefield”. After the war, she ran the Office of Missing Soldiers, in Washington from 1865-68. Traveling in Europe she was introduced in 1869 to the International Committee of the Red Cross.
A barn fire in Sandy Spring in 1842 led to the 1848 chartering of the Mutual Fire Insurance Co. Edward Stabler was president from 1848 to his 1883 death. Stabler, a progressive farmer, was also a skilled engraver who donated to the company its seal. The company’s 1857 first building in Sandy Spring was replaced in 1904 and enlarged in 1931. As of December 31, 1894, the company estimated 10,500 policies were in force, with agents in sixteen Maryland counties and the District of Columbia.
These insurance records are an invaluable holding in our library collection as a source of late nineteenth-century property descriptions in Montgomery County.