Biographies - Thomas W. Barber

--- - December 6, 1855

Originally from Pennsylvania, Thomas W. Barber was the son of Thomas and Mary Oliver Barber. He came to Kansas Territory in 1855 from Richmond, Indiana, where he was a manufacturer of woolen cloths.

Once in the territory, Barber took a claim north of the Wakarusa River (Bloomington vicinity), some eight miles southwest of Lawrence, and became involved in the free-state cause. He was shot and killed by a proslave party-reportedly by George W. Clark, the Indian agent-on December 6, 1855, on a road four miles southwest of Lawrence. Barber, who was in the company of his brother Robert F. Barber and Thomas M. Pierson at the time of the shooting, had gone to the aid of his Lawrence neighbors during the so-called "Wakarusa War," and, while his assailant was reportedly bragging that he had "sent another of these d--d abolitionists to his winter quarters," Barber's body was being taken to Lawrence where he became an instant martyr.

This incident perhaps influenced Governor Wilson Shannon to increase his efforts to work a truce between the two factions who stood on the brink of open warfare. The following year T. W. Barber's brother Oliver moved to Kansas where he was active in territorial and state politics, serving as a Douglas County commissioner and in the territorial and state legislatures.