Date/Time
Date(s) - 02/14/2026 - 05/09/2026
12:00 am
Location
Andrew Carnegie Free Library & Music Hall
Categories
This exhibit features portraits and personal stories of women who served as nurses during the Civil War.
The United States experienced a bloody and decisive civil war from 1861 to 1865. The enslavement of forcibly immigrated Africans was the root cause with branches touching on religion, economics, race, power and the relationship between the individual states and the federal government. Pro-slavery states ceded and formed a confederacy while remaining states are referred to as the Union. Pittsburgh provided a significant source of personnel, war equipment, armament, ammunition and supplies to the Union Army.
It is estimated that over 20,000 women served as volunteer nurses during the war, enduring long hours and multiple tours of duty across both front-line battlefields and at numerous hospitals and communities across the country. Forbidden from serving in “indelicate” medical settings at the outset of the Civil War, women quickly broke down social conventions in caring for the sick and wounded, risking both disease and the brutal realities of war. These women provided invaluable aid, from changing bandages and cooking food to comforting the dying, and innumerable other tasks.
Address
300 Beechwood Avenue,
Carnegie,
PA
15106
United States