Interior of the Clara Barton House in Glen Echo, Maryland

The first floor of the Clara Barton House is open for tours, but the rooms remain unfurnished. The 45-minute tours are given on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sunday year-round at the top of each hour beginning at 1 PM, with the last tour at 4 PM. There is no charge and no need to register unless you have a group of twelve or more people. If that’s the case, call (301) 320-1400 to make a reservation. Get the current schedule on the National Park Service’s Things to Do web page for Clara Barton National Historic Site.

The Clara Barton House was furnished prior to a closure in 2015 for safety reasons. The house was partially reopened (first floor only) in 2022 after a minimal restoration, and a full restoration is in the works for the second half of the 2020s, so don’t expect it to be open for much longer. The furnishings are a mixture of Barton’s possessions and period antiques and reproductions from the 1897-1904 time period, the years the house was used not only as Barton’s residence, but also as the headquarters for the American Red Cross. After Barton died in 1912, the house was willed to her long time associate Dr. Julian Hubbell. He got mixed up with a con-artist who claimed she was in contact with Barton from the afterlife and that Barton wanted Hubbell to give the house and property to her, which he did. Hubbell instigated a ten-year lawsuit against the lady, but not before all of the furnishings had been sold off. He eventually won the lawsuit in 1927 and regained title to the property. Items were returned over the years, but only a dozen or so furniture pieces can be verified as actually having belonged to Barton. Overall, about a third of the items that are part of Clara Barton National Historic Site are original.

After Hubbell died in 1929, the house went to his nieces. They turned the bottom floor into a Clara Barton museum and rented out the rest of the rooms to help pay for the upkeep. It was sold in 1942 to Josephine Noyes, who continued to use it as a boarding house. In 1963 the non-profit organization Friends of Clara Barton was able to purchase the house, and when the Federal government created the Clara Barton National Historic Site in 1975, the house and furnishings were sold to the government.

The following video covers the history of the Glen Echo house. For an even more in depth video on Barton and the house, see the Clara Barton National Historic Site video on C-Span.