page_title: Armory Square Hospital
section_title: The Hospital
hierarchical_section_title: Armory Square Hospital / History / The Hospital
caption_attribution_description: English: Title: Panoramic view of Washington, D.C. Creator(s): Hacker, Francis, photographer Date Created/Published: 1879? Medium: 5 photographic prints (1 panorama)&#160;: albumen&#160;; 16 x 22 in. Summary: Five-part panorama shows the mall area of Washington, D.C., and surrounding buildings, from the Smithsonian Institution Building (now the "Castle"). Left section shows Washington Monument under construction in background, with Agriculture Department at left. The left center and center sections show the B Street (now Constitution Avenue) side of the Mall with building trade structures and Center Market. The right center section shows Baltimore and Potomac railroad station and tracks. The right section includes the U.S. Capitol in background and Independence Avenue area of Capitol Hill. Reproduction Number: LC-USZC4-12138 (color film copy transparency of right section) LC-USZ62-90246 (b&amp;w film copy neg. of left section) LC-USZ62-90247 (b&amp;w film copy neg. of left center section) LC-USZ62-90248 (b&amp;w film copy neg. of center section) LC-USZ62-90249 (b&amp;w film copy neg. of right center section) LC-USZ62-90250 (b&amp;w film copy neg. of right section) Rights Advisory: No known restrictions on publication. No known restrictions on publication. Call Number: LOT 12361, no. 1 [item] (H size) [P&amp;P] Repository: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA Notes: All prints are albumen except for the center section, which is silver printing-out paper. Attributed to Francis Hacker. Five separate prints provide a panoramic view when placed side-by-side. Photos are numbered to indicate arrangement sequence. Transfer; LC Geography &amp; Map Division (original source unknown). Published in: Washingtoniana Photographs ... Library of Congress, 1989. http://dcpast.com/post/73217646803/1879-panoramic-view-of-washington
context_page_description: The Armory Square Hospital formally known as the District Armory or Armory of the District of Columbia was a military hospital for the Union Army located on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., which operated from 1862 to 1865. It stood at the intersection of 6th Street SW and B Street SW between the Smithsonian Castle and the Capitol. The 12 wards extended across the Mall, all the way to the Canal. Today, the National Air and Space Museum stands in its place.
context_section_description: Following the American Civil War's 1861 beginning, President Abraham Lincoln asked Doctor Willard Bliss to organize a system of hospitals in and around the city of Washington, D.C. Among the facilities which resulted from this directive were several facilities which were built in or near Washington, D.C., including the Armory Square Hospital, which was built on the land surrounding the city's Armory in 1862.
  It offered 1,000 beds in twelve wards (barracks) and overflow tents to treat the wounded from the battlefields of Virginia. Wounded soldiers were brought across the Potomac River to the city wharves in southwest Washington, D.C., including the Fish Wharf as well as on the Long Bridge which landed at the other end of Maryland Avenue SW a few blocks away. In addition to these barracks, quarters for officers, service facilities and a chapel where built on site.
  The closest to the arrival points for the steamboats of all of the Washington, D.C.-based Union Army hospitals, it became the treatment facility where the gravely wounded remained, receiving end-of-life care if terminally ill or undergoing additional surgeries or other types of treatment until well enough to be shipped home or moved to a hospital farther away from the war. Volunteers from the northern States came to provide assistance in the hospitals including the Armory as nurses as well as support staff. Dr. Bliss became the superintendent for the hospital and remained to practice in the city after the war.
  Among those volunteers was poet Walt Whitman, who had made his way from New York to Washington, D.C., after reading that his brother might have been wounded. After finding his brother and learning that he had sustained only a minor injury, Whitman realized the depth of suffering that other less fortunate soldiers were enduring, and began volunteering as part of the Christian Commission in the city hospitals, visiting wounded soldiers and developing close relationships with many of them and raising money for provisions for them. This experience would have a profound influence on him and his later writings. In The Wound Dresser, he wrote:
  I devote myself much to Armory-square hospital because it contains by far the worst cases, most repulsive wounds, has the most suffering and most need of consolation. I go every day without fail, and often at night – sometimes stay very late.
  Close to the White House, the Armory hospital was visited by President Lincoln in 1863, as reported by Amanda Akin Stearns in her memoir, The lady nurse of Ward E, which was published in 1909:
  It was pathetic to see him pass from bed to bed and give each occupant the warm, honest grasp for which he is noted. I hear that he is especially interested in this hospital, and has suggested having flower beds made between the wards with plants from the Government gardens, which Dr. Bliss is having done. His homely face with such sad eyes and ungainly figure did not fill my youthful idea of a "President of the United States"; but it was a grand thing for him to come and cheer our soldier boys with his presence. 
  Hospital chaplains also worked to ease the suffering of wounded soldiers, dispensing books and other reading materials, as well as words of comfort and advice. The first issue of the Armory Square Hospital Gazette was published on January 6, 1864. In an article entitle Salutatory, the publisher wrote: "the Hospital is an episode in  soldier's life—sometimes a painful termination of it, which has many an event worthy of a chronicle. Such we propose this paper to be.
  The Gazette went on for several months, offering reading and news updates to patients and recognition staff for their service. The last issue was published on the 21 August 1865. With hostilities ended following the Surrender at Appomattox on April 9, 1865, and the resulting decline in the number of patients being sent to Union Army hospitals, military leaders determined that the Armory hospital was no longer needed and was closed during the summer of 1865. The last edition of the hospital newspaper, which was published on 21 
caption: View of the eastern side of the Mall in 1879. The Armory is the first square building on the right.
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