One day in my 11th grade English class, when we were studying Walt Whitman, the teacher, Mr. Epes, told us that Whitman had served as a nurse at federal hospitals in the Washington area during the Civil War. As we all knew, The High School, shut down for the war, had been taken over by the Union army and used as a hospital. So it was quite possible, he said, that Whitman may have worked at Episcopal, maybe even in the very room we were sitting in.