Clara Barton, Professional Angel. Elizabeth Brown Pryor
not say that he worshipped in that church, he surely always saw that his family worshipped in it”—yet he worked consistently to build and maintain the church and three years after Clara’s birth was elected an officer.18
Universalism and his own father’s charity encouraged a strong commitment to philanthropy in Stephen Barton. Between 1826 and 1836 he annually donated $574 toward caring for the community’s poor, and in 1831 he used his own funds to establish a house in which destitute families could be maintained.19 These acts were gratefully remembered by many Oxford citizens. “I never new [sic] a Barton much stuck up,” stated a neighbor who had benefited from Stephen Barton’s benevolence. “I well recolect [sic] the time I was sick at your house and how you doctored me and wated [sic] on me a Poor Boy I never shall forget it.”20
Stephen Barton exercised his influence at home as well as in the community, though there he had considerable competition from his strong-willed wife. Sarah Stone was ten years younger than her husband. She may once have been the “fine looking” woman of Clara’s memory, but she came to have a rotund, featureless face. She was the daughter of a well-respected North Oxford family, middle-class and with few pretensions. Sarah shared her husband’s Baptist background and his more recently developed interest in Universalist principles.21 She seems to have been a homebody, indulging in few activities outside the domestic circle, but she had strong opinions on political and social topics. In the 1830s, well before the abolitionist movement gained a foothold in New England, she signed several antislavery petitions that were sent to the United States House of Representatives.22 Sarah Barton was also outspoken on the subject of women’s rights. Her youngest daughter recalled that she was so early exposed to feminist ideals that she believed she “must have been born believing in the full right of woman to all privileges and positions which nature and justice accord her…. When as a young woman I heard the subject discussed it seemed simply ridiculous that any sensible rational person should question it.”23
Stephen and Sarah Barton shared liberal sentiments, but they were of entirely different temperaments. Clara described her father as a “calm, sound, reasonable high-tuned moral man”; she remembered her mother as ambitious and of “extreme vigor, always did two days work in one, never slept after 3 o’clock, both nervy and nervous.” 24 Industrious and ingenious, she carried on the multitude of daily chores expected of a New England housewife. Her eccentricities and thriftiness were legendary in the town. A daughter-in-law reported to her family that Sarah fed the Barton's on fruits and vegetables that were not fresh, curiously waiting until they were beginning to decay before she served them. She diligently inspected the vegetable bins, picked out the half-spoiled produce, and spent hours paring and cutting away the decayed portions. Sarah also had the habit of baking a great number of mince or apple pies, then carefully storing them in the cellar pantry. She protected this hoard jealously and was highly displeased if the family requested a slice. The pies, like her fresh produce, inevitably became moldy and unfit to eat. Once in a burst of anger her son Stephen slipped down to the cellar and threw the pies into a pail for hog feed. When confronted by his mother he told her that only pigs would eat moldy pies. The protest did not cure her.25
Sarah Barton coupled this peculiarity with a short and fiery temper. Difficult to please, she exhibited her dissatisfaction with color and gusto. She once dismantled a new iron cookstove, the gift of her husband, and threw it piece by piece into the farm pond because she thought it less functional than her old fireplace oven. She muttered and swore whenever anything displeased her and had little patience with the people around her, who she believed did not work up to her expectations. A story is told that when Sarah Barton died, one of her young granddaughters was brought to see her as she lay in her coffin. A few minutes later someone asked the child if she had seen her grandmother. “Yes,” the little girl replied, “I saw grandma and she never swored once.”26
Stephen and Sarah Barton’s strong personalities made for a stormy relationship. While Stephen’s word was the rule, Sarah loudly protested any interference in her domestic work. Frequently they quarreled violently. In one case Sarah, exasperated with her task of changing the bedding, threw a feather tick down the stairs, catching her husband full in the face and scattering feathers over the entire room. Stephen's anger knew no bounds for some time. He ordered Sarah to recapture every feather, but she complied with such a vigor, “muttering imprecations so vengeful,” that Stephen left home for several days. It was with such scenes that domestic issues were reconciled, and with which Clara grew up.27
The eldest child of this tempestuous union was Dorothea, called Dolly after a paternal aunt. She was tall and dark-haired, a keen student with a good mind and an unbridled desire for learning. At the time of her sister Clara’s birth she was a teacher in North Oxford. Like her mother, Dolly had a magnificent temper and an excitable nature, though she possessed enough patience to do intricate embroidery and to write poetry in a flowing, ornate script. She seems to have been especially interested in Clara, and much of the baby’s daily attention came from this quarter. Sensitive and scholarly, Dolly longed to obtain a higher education than that offered in the village school and wept when made to attend classes with a less bookish brother, who she felt disgraced the family. In later years Clara was to remember her eldest sister’s tender care and “ever watchful hand,” and to give Dolly credit for much of her own interest in intellectual pursuits. “Under suitable conditions…,” maintained Clara, “she should have been the flower of the flock.”28
But Dolly Barton’s nervous and sensitive nature led to tragedy when Clara was six years old. In 1827 Dolly had a mental breakdown from which she never recovered. In an era in which mental illness was regarded as shameful and virtually no treatment was available, the best the Barton family could do was to keep Dolly away from society and try to control her flaring temper. In time Dolly became actually dangerous. She cut her beautiful embroidery into shreds, and the rockers on her favorite chair had to be halted with a restraining strip of wood to keep her from rocking too furiously. As her condition worsened she was kept in a locked room with barred windows to control her rages. She would often beat on the door and scream to be let out. Once she escaped and spent the night in the deep woods outside of the village. Another time she tried to violently attack the wife of her brother David with an axe; the young woman was saved only when her husband ran from a nearby field and restrained Dolly.29
The Barton's never knew what caused Dolly’s insanity, but the tragedy of this sister, “so bright, so scholarly, so promising, and so early blighted,” haunted Clara throughout her life.30 In the late 1870s Clara confided to a doctor that she believed it was due to “some menstrual obstruction which was not understood or treated”—a common medical misunderstanding of the time.31 Later, however, Clara told a niece that she believed Dolly would not have lost her mind if she had been able to obtain proper schooling and fulfill her ambitions in the world of letters. Her constant brooding and inward reflection only increased her unhappiness and finally drove her to despair. Significantly, Barton never referred to her sister’s insanity publicly and only rarely did so in private. In her autobiography, The Story of My Childhood, she notes only that her eldest sister was “an invalid.”32
Of Barton’s siblings, the most dominant personality seems to have been Stephen junior. He was fifteen when his youngest sister was born and had already gone through his own maturing trials. He was physically strong and athletically inclined but, like his mother, was excitable and nervous. As a child he found it difficult to settle down to studying—at twelve he was still unable to read.33 He resisted his parents’ admonitions, then suddenly decided for himself that he would like an education. By studying at night after a day of farm chores, Stephen surpassed the rest of the town’s pupils within a year, being especially noted for his “power and quick wits in mathematics.”34 While Clara was still a child he became a teacher. After a few years, however, his father deeded the Barton mills to his sons and they became two of the town’s noted industrialists. He had a keen business sense, and during the years Clara was growing up Stephen was gaining a reputation as a sharp trader, his mathematical ability apparently sometimes overriding the strict morality of his Universalist upbringing.35
If rumors of