Hagerstown Magazine - The Best of Life in Washington County & Beyond

July/August 2009
A History of Service: The Red Cross
The Red Cross Has Supported Military Families and Provided Disaster Relief for More Than 125 Years.

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Clara Barton and a circle of acquaintances founded the American Red Cross in Washington, D.C., on May 21, 1881. Barton first heard of the Swiss-inspired International Red Cross Movement while visiting Europe after the Civil War. Returning home, she campaigned for an American Red Cross society and for ratification of the Geneva Convention protecting the war-injured, which the United States ratified in 1882.

Barton headed the Red Cross for 23 years, during which time it conducted its first domestic and overseas disaster relief efforts, aided the United States military during the Spanish-American War, and campaigned successfully for the inclusion of peacetime relief work as part of the International Red Cross Movement. The Red Cross received its first congressional charter in 1900 and a second in 1905. This charter, which remains in effect today, sets forth the purposes of the organization that include giving relief to and serving as a medium of communication between members of the American armed forces and their families and providing national and international disaster relief and mitigation.

With the outbreak of war, the organization experienced phenomenal growth. The number of local chapters jumped from 107 in 1914 to 3,864 in 1918, and membership grew from 17,000 to more than 20 million adult and 11 million Junior Red Cross members. The Washington County chapter of the American Red Cross was first established in 1917, and by 1918 more than 6,000 local people had volunteered to help the Red Cross in the war effort. Today, the Washington County Red Cross has more than 1,200 volunteers who assist with blood drives, disaster relief efforts, military family emergency services and teaching CPR and First Aid training classes.

After the war, the Red Cross focused on service to veterans and enhanced its programs in safety training, accident prevention, home care for the sick and nutrition education. It also provided relief for victims of such major disasters as the Mississippi River floods in 1927 and severe drought and the Depression during the 1930s.

The organization grew from the rigorous battlefields to offering health programs and establishing the first community blood mobiles to help the military and community hospitals. During the 1990s, it engineered a massive modernization of its blood services operations to improve the safety of its blood products. The Red Cross provides almost 50 percent of blood used in the United States today. This year, the Washington County Red Cross Chapter predicts they will collect almost 9,200 units of blood for area hospitals and people living in the community.