The Early Morning Confessions of AnnaLisa: Clara Barton Missing Soldier's Office Museum and National Portrait Gallery

One of my friends told me about the Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office Museum in downtown Washington D.C. that she had visited a couple of days before.

I had never heard of the museum but it sounded really interesting. I invited two of my friends (who I also used to work with) to go with me to the museum. I really liked the museum!

It took about an hour to go through the museum and it cost a little bit of money, but it was worth it. It was really interesting and I learned a lot about Clara Barton. She was an awesome lady!

Before going to this museum, I actually hadn't even heard of the Missing Soldiers Office. Clara Barton opened the office in 1865 to help family members of soldiers find their loved ones who were captured or had gone missing during the Civil War. The office stayed open for four years.

In the 1990s, the building where the museum is now was sold to a person who was going to knock the building down. Someone was searching through the attic before knocking it down and found some stuff connected to Clara Barton.

After some research they realized that Clara Barton had lived in that building and that the Missing Soldiers Office had also been located in that building. Finding that stuff in the attic saved the building from being knocked down.

I'm so happy that they didn't end up knocking down the building because what a piece of history would have been lost if they had. Obviously we would have still known about Clara Barton and the Missing Soldiers Office but to be in the actual room where the office was located was awesome!

I don't know if this picture will be big enough to read if you click on it but it's quite an interesting story. The letter on the left is from a sister of a soldier who hadn't heard from her brother in over two years and she wrote to the Missing Soldiers Office asking for help in locating him. Clara Barton put the soldiers name on the Missing Soldiers list that was posted in all of the major cities.

The middle letter is from the brother to the Missing Soldiers Office. He ended up seeing his own name on the list and wrote back saying he was mortified to see his name on the list and that he would contact his family when he wanted to. (But he hadn't written them in two years and he didn't think that his family might wonder where he was. What a jerk.)

The letter on the right is the letter from Clara Barton to the soldier. Clara Barton wrote the soldier back and put him in his place. I like that the letter shows Clara's personality and let's the soldier know that he was jerk (although the word jerk was not used in the letter).

The sign they found in the attic of the building that gave a clue that Clara Barton had a connection to this building.

This room is where the Missing Soldiers Office was located when it was open. (Obviously the chairs and the projector were not part of the original office) ;)

Sandy and Heather and I outside of the museum. If you're ever in Washington D.C. and looking for something new to do, I highly recommend visiting this museum!

Since I knew we were going to be downtown around lunchtime I looked up places to eat near where the museum was. I found a pizza place with good reviews (Ella's Wood Fired Kitchen) and we decided to try that. We ended up not eating there, though, because when we arrived there to get a table they couldn't tell us how long the wait was going to be. We were worried the wait might be a long time (since it was clearly a popular place) so we decided to find someplace else to eat.

I remembered this pizza place around the corner (Pi Pizzeria) from previous times I had been downtown and we decided to go there instead. Their wait time was only twenty minutes but ended up being only five minutes. Yay!

Sandy, Heather, and I shared garlic knots and a pizza and we all thoroughly enjoyed the lunch. :) We all said we would happily eat there again. (I really loved the garlic knots there; they were delicious!)

After we ate lunch we visited the National Portrait Gallery to see the new life size painting of President Abraham Lincoln. Not that the painting is new itself (because it was painted in 1865 by W.F.K. Travers) but that it's new to the National Portrait Gallery. It's on a long-term loan from the Hartley Dodge Foundation.

I should've taken a picture of myself with the painting so you could tell how big the painting actually is. Oh well. It was cool to see though!

We walked through all of the Presidents Gallery at the National Portrait Museum and I really liked this painting of President Barack Obama.

We saw some other exhibits at the museum and they were cool but I didn't take many other pictures.

Going to the National Portrait Gallery was the last thing on our agenda for the day, but Sandy wanted to see the cherry blossoms while we were downtown (especially since the weekend we were there it was peak cherry blossom time).

So we made our way to the Tidal Basin. Along the way to the cherry blossoms we saw this happening in front of the Washington Monument, some sister nuns (I don't know what they're called) playing frisbee. That was a unique sight to see.

We made it to the Tidal Basin! It was really crowded so we didn't walk all of the way around but we got to enjoy seeing some of the cherry blossom trees.

I didn't take any pictures of the flowers myself because there were so many people and I've been there before and knew I wasn't going to get any great photos that day.