Harewood General Hospital

Among the notable figures who visited with and/or rendered care to sick and injured soldiers at Harewood Hospital were President Abraham Lincoln and his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, and the American poet Walt Whitman.[4][5]

"When President Lincoln and his family resided at the Soldiers' Home, they moved closer to the action of the Civil War, according to Erin Carlson Mast, executive director of President Lincoln's Cottage. "From greeting wounded soldiers en route to Harewood Hospital, to witnessing growing numbers of contraband camps and military burials, Lincoln’s life at the Soldiers’ Home connected him profoundly to the stark realities of the Civil War."[6]

Whitman, who had heard that his brother had been wounded in battle but had found, after traveling from New York to Washington, D.C., that his brother had sustained only a minor injury, quickly realized that he could help other soldiers who were enduring far worse. After he began volunteering in city hospitals as part of the Christian Commission, one of the services he provided was to write letters on behalf of soldiers who were illiterate or too ill or injured to do so themselves. One of those letters — one of only three such examples of Whitman's "soldiers' letters" still known to still exist — was penned by the poet on January 21, 1866, to the wife and six children of a member of the 8th New Hampshire Infantry, Private Robert N. Jabo, who died from tuberculosis on December 19, 1866. It was discovered in February 2016 in the National Archives.[7]