On August 4th, 1862, Clara Barton and her assistants were at Falmouth Station when General Burnside’s troops arrived from North Carolina via Aquia Creek. She was distributing supplies to the 21st MA and learned they were headed to join the Army of Virginia near Culpeper Court House. Clara returned to Washington, D.C. to gather more supplies and on August 9th she heard that a battle was being fought south of Culpeper. It would be two days before she learned that casualties were high.
The medical director of the Army of Virginia Dr. Thomas P. McParlin had established dressing stations near the battlefield and an evacuation hospital in Culpeper on the Orange and Alexandria Railroad. From there military trains would bring the sick and wounded to Alexandria, VA, fifty miles away. Clara was determined to go to Culpeper realizing that it was likely that the army would be short of medical supplies, which she could obtain and distribute.
She procured a pass, with the help of Colonel Rucker, from General Pope’s assistant inspector general in Washington, D.C. allowing her to take supplies to Culpeper using the military railroad. She and Anna Carver, accompanied by Gardner Tufts, the new head of the Massachusetts state relief agency in Washington, D.C., took a load of supplies to Alexandria. When they arrived there the first train in from the battlefield pulled in with 480 wounded. The train would be returning to the Culpeper the next day and she was determined to be on it. Clara and her coworkers spent the evening in the rain loading a boxcar with a variety of medical supplies. The train arrived in Culpeper on August 13th in mid-afternoon. There was a makeshift “evacuation station” where several hundred men were lying in the sun in 90-degree heat awaiting evacuation by train. They lay there begging for water with no medical attendants in sight. The Culpeper Train Station is shown below.
There she learned that there were hundreds more wounded at the Culpeper Court House, at churches, a tobacco factory, the Masonic Hall, private homes, and in tents.
The surgical teams were short of supplies. Clara obtained a four-horse army wagon from Colonel Rucker’s Quartermaster Department and began distributing supplies. For Clara this would be the first time she had visited military field hospitals during the war after a battle and aided soldiers on a battlefield. Although she had witnessed an amputation on her recent trip to Fredericksburg, she had never seen anything on this scale. She was still delivering supplies at midnight when she arrived at the hospital where Dr. James L. Dunn of Sigel’s Corps was working. He had performed 22 thigh amputations in the last 24 hours and was out of bandages when she arrived. She and Anna Carver spent two days without sleep delivering supplies and helping to clean the hospitals. They returned to Washington, D.C. on the 15th. Clara Barton had identified an important niche that she and her assistants could help fill and she asked for and received a leave of absence from her job in the Patent Office. Clara would restock her supplies and return for the battle of Second Manassas where she would also function for the first time as a battlefield nurse.
Source
A Woman of Valor Clara Barton and the Civil War by Stephen B. Oates.
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