Marcus M. Bartlett was a Civil War soldier who was wounded in the Battle of Spotsylvania in 1864. After the war, while living and working in the War Department’s Paymaster General’s Office in Washington, DC, he travelled around the area drawing and painting many sketches of Washington, DC, Virginia, and Maryland. Marcus preserved his drawings by pasting them into large books that kept them in very good condition over the years. The boxes were stored in attics and moved from one family home to another over the years, until Dana Finnegan, his great grand-daughter, took them out of the boxes and really began to look at them. She found the sketches so remarkable and interesting, she wanted to share the drawings so that others could see his work from an artistic and historical perspective.