Barber Family History (extremely short version)
Samuel Barber, currently the earliest known of our Barber ancestors
was born around 1785 in Maryland, orphaned young, and raised by
an uncle in Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Demonstrating the family
vagabonding tradition, he disappeared as a teenager, showing up
near Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 1807 when a plantation manager
asks for his arrest for deserting his job and absconding with
clothes and property loaned him. He seemed to go straight after
this, marrying Elizabeth Barrow in 1813, serving in the war of
1812 during the Battle of New Orleans, fathering five boys and
two girls, farming, and raising cattle.
By the late 1820's Louisiana was no doubt too "settled
up" for Samuel's taste, or perhaps the vagabonding gene simply
struck again--in
any case he joined many of his neighbors and moved the whole outfit
to the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas to the west, ultimately
settling in what would become Liberty County, Texas. A final daughter
was born on the way. Each of Samuel's children became, or married,
cattle men, and by the late 40's all but two of them moved "out
west" to Gonzales and Refugio counties where conditions,
and available land, for cattle were more favorable. Just before
leaving, John Albert Barber, Samuel's second son, married Elizabeth,
the daughter of David Levi Kokernot, a locally unpopular figure
accused of excessive enthusiasm in carrying out Sam Houston's
orders to arrest Tories (Mexican sympathizers) after the Battle
of San Jacinto in the War for Texan Independance in 1836. No Tories
were arrested, but much of their liquor was consumed and cattle
driven off.
John Albert Barber, like his brothers and sister nearby, helped
build the cattle business in those years before the War Between
the States--a business which was to explode in the years after
the War. Before that, however, they had to endure the Mexican
War and the raiding and
killings that followed. The war years 1861-1865 brought deprivation
and death, followed by military occupation. John Albert's mother
and father both died during the War, at advanced ages, but his
own unexpected death in 1869 left children from age 1 to 22, his
oldest son Amos taking guardianship of the younger ones.
The second of his sons, Addison Barber, was twenty years old
and married with a son when John Albert died. Fortunately for
him, both his father and Henderson Williams, his wife Adeline's
father, had given the couple gifts of land in nearby Bee county,
where they would live out their lives raising cattle and farming
and which land is still owned by their descendants.
Addison's third son George
Levi "Lee" Barber, born in 1874 on the farm in Bee County,
evidently decided that the farming and cowpoking life was not
for him or was infected like his ancestors with the vagabonding
gene. After marrying a local girl, Cora Hatcher, he immediately
left for east Texas, where his grandfather grew up, and later
settled in Dickens County, near Lubbock, Texas. Lee made his living
many ways: buying and selling land, running hardware and grocery
stores and restaurants, constructing roads, and sheriffing (Dickens
County, two terms). Though he was never either a cowboy or farmer,
he always cultivated a small patch and ran a few cows, wherever
he was.
So, after five generations in Texas, what could Lee's second
son, "Vic", my grandfather, be expected to do when the
Barber vagabonding urge struck? Pack up and move the whole outfit,
of course--first to northern Idaho, then, in 1947, to Alaska.
Vic continued his father's vocation of construction and trucking
and continued the Barber vagabonding tradition as well. Indeed,
he left no frontier for the rest of us when he led the first convoy
of trucks to the Arctic Ocean over winter ice, before any road
was built, in an experiment to discover if this would be a practical
way to supply construction crews for the Alaska pipeline (it wasn't).
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