It's 1996 in Washington, DC, and a carpenter named Richard Lions is about to inspect an

old rundown shoe store.

The building it's in is marked for demolition, and it's in bad shape.

Richard goes inside, climbs the stairs, and finds that everything is covered in dust.

All the lights are out.

He walks to the window, turns around, and that's when he sees it.

He looks up, and there is an envelope sticking out of the ceiling, an old envelope.

He does something then that I would never do.

He gets a ladder, climbs up, and sticks his hand up in the attic, feeling around.

And at this point, the first thing he touches is a small metal sign about 8 by 8 inches

that says office of missing soldiers, third floor, Miss Clara Barton.

There's a camp stove, utensils, broken crates, a hairbrush, a tooth brush, bloody socks.

Richard thinks that this, this, is something important.

I'm Dylan Thuress, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible,

and wondrous places.

And today we're taking you to a place that changed the lives of thousands of civil war soldiers

and their families, a place that was almost lost to history, the Clara Barton Missing

Soldier's Office.

We'll visit after this.

It's unusual sort of in a museum that number one could have been destroyed.

And number two, the artifacts were found in the space where you're looking at them.

So it's almost like you can breathe them.

...