William James Barrow affected the history of library and archives conservation as no other single individual has. His effect was due to a combination of historical events, environmental factors, opportunities, and his own unique talents, personality, training, and social class. He was a colorful figure, and his reputation within conservation as a multifaceted genius is the stuff of legend, a legend rooted in his own self-promotion. In this chapter I have attempted to show the earliest sources of the legend and to find how his personality, family, and social status made possible his achievements.
Examination of Barrow's early life and development illuminates his personality in both direct and indirect ways. His family is understandably interested in presenting his image in the best possible light. the family also exhibits his reported story-telling ability, social skills, and charm. As a result, family interviews revealed a picture of his early life in keeping with his public image: an affable southern gentleman with an overriding passion for paper. That these informants desire to project a positive family image and that their stories exactly reflect his own self-promotion, can be considered neither coincidence nor fact, but rather explanation or legend. Family recollections are often molded by subsequent events and selected in hindsight. Barrow's family is not an exception. The family memories are recounted here, not as verifiable fact, but for the light they can shed on the sources of his public image.
The Barrow family has had a long past in Virginia, beginning with Thomas Barrow who immigrated to America from Lancashire, England, some time in the early eighteenth century. a family descendant, John Barrow, living in Prince George County, was granted land patents in 1745 in Brunswick County, totaling 1,012 acres. He deeded 200 acres of the Brunswick County property to each of his two sons, William and John, in 1746 (see Appendix 3 for ancestor list). Brunswick County covers 529 square miles in the southern part of Virginia in the rolling hills of the eastern edge of the Piedmont region. According to a contemporary local history, the county population in 1904, the year Barrow was born, was 18,217, made up of the following groups: White, 7,375; Black, 10,842; and foreign born, 21 (Gannett 1980 [1904], 30). The character of Brunswick County is unlike the cosmopolitan cities of Virginia; it borders on North Carolina and has more in common with rural areas in the Deep South. the county was agricultural and remains so today; its peak population of 21,000 was reached in 1920. Major crops were tobacco, cotton, with moonshine whiskey accounting for a large part of the economy. Local histories of Brunswick County abound with landmarks, stores, and banks that bear the Barrow name, giving testimony to the social position and influence of the extended family that had flourished within the county (Neale 1975, 256-257).
In this chapter, Barrow is referred to as "Bill" to distinguish him from other family members. Bill's direct family line can be traced back in Brunswick County to his great-great-grandfather, John Barrow, who married Jane (Jincy) Johnson in 1803. Their son, William Johnson Barrow, was Bill's great-grandfather. Bill's grandfather, William Henry Barrow, was born in 1830. He and his wife, Lucy Ann Elizabeth Hawthorne, had a son, Bernard in 1874 (see Appendix 2 for ancestor list).
Bernard Barrow, Bill's father, came from a family of ten children, seven boys and three girls. He was born on 15 December 1874 and raised on a plantation, which later became Poale, Virginia. He attended preparatory school at Randolph-Macon Academy, a military academy, in Bedford, Virginia. When Bernard graduated, his father gave him a house and land to help establish him as a plantation owner. Bernard, who wanted to study medicine rather than farm, sold the land in order to go to the University of Maryland Medical School (Davey 1990). Thus Bernard chose what was the more "modest life" of a country doctor. He graduated medical school in 1898, second highest in his class (R. G. Barrow 1987). He was in one of the first classes to do internships as part of their medical education. He interned in Pennsylvania, specializing in the study of ear, nose, and throat diseases. He did research during this internship to develop sanitary standards for barbershops, which at the time still practiced a few forms of medical treatment. Bernard was interested in the ideas of a sterile surgery and saw barbershops as "filthy and disease producing." the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was not interested in promoting these standards at the time, but Bernard's standards were the basis for those eventually adopted in Maryland (Davey 1990).
Bernard married Sallie Virginia Archer in 1898. She was raised in Petersburg, Virginia. Her father, Alfred Archer, while in the Confederate Army was wounded and taken prisoner at the age of 16 in 1864 during the siege of Petersburg. Her father died at a relatively young age because of his war wounds. Sallie had wanted to attend Wellesley College, but her family could not afford it. Instead she graduated in 1895, one of 14 in her class, from Davis College, a women's college in Petersburg. She was described as being very popular and a good pianist who also sang (Davey 1990).
After their marriage, Bernard and Sallie lived in an ordinary, country house in eastern Brunswick County outside the small town of Dundas, where he was the local doctor. Their home was about 12 miles from Blackstone, the nearest town of any size. Sarah, their first child was born in 1901. Their son, Bill was born three years later (Davey 1990).
Bernard's practice among the country farmers was not lucrative. The Barrows supplemented their income by using the land surrounding their own house for sharecropping tobacco, cattle, chickens, vegetables, and lumbering. Their land had sharecropper's cabins, sheds, outbuildings, an icehouse, dug ponds, and woods. William Archer Barrow, one of Bill's twin sons, remembers his grandparents' family home nostalgically. "There was plenty to play in and build around for a boy interested in building and engineering." Bernard and Sallie were buried on their land in a private graveyard in a wooded area in sight of their home (W. A. Barrow 1987).
Everyone who worked for the family lived on the Barrow property. Bill's widow, Ruth, showed me photographs of Bill as a child. She pointed out a house in the background, "that place in the back always had a colored family in it. Usually one would work in the kitchen for Bill's mother.... Each one [of the Barrow children] had a colored child given to them at birth . . . as did my eldest son, Bernard [Bernard Gibbs Barrow]" (R. G. Barrow 1987). Sarah, Bill's older sister, further explained that this arrangement insured that she and Bill each had a "colored playmate". Bill's playmate was named "Leme Call You" and Sarah's was "Virgie Lee." in addition, a trained nurse was stationed in the house while their mother and father went on trips to medical conferences (Davey 1990).
Ruth described Bill's background succinctly when she said that in Brunswick County "people know exactly who you are" (R. G. Barrow 1987). According to Sarah, her family was socially "equal to most in Virginia" (Davey 1990).
Sarah remembered that their father was a better doctor than were the other doctors in their region. "Doctors are not supposed to doctor their own families, so another doctor came during Bill's birth who had patients with childbirth fever, and passed the fever on to our mother. Our father was sorry he didn't deliver her.... He was always clean and washed his hands between patients." Childbirth was still a common cause of death at that time, so common, in fact, that Sallie's mother had an elaborate photographic portrait taken of Sallie before Sarah's birth because she feared her daughter would die giving birth. Sallie had to travel all the way to Petersburg from Brunswick County to have that portrait made (Davey 1990).
Bill's father was reportedly a strong-willed, active man who was forced to spend almost half his life as an invalid due partly to his service in the military. at 45 years of age, he left his family and his practice to volunteer for the army in 1917. He had the rank of captain in the Signal Corps. He did not like the ways of the army and was very unhappy during his time of service. He not only stood up for the rights of the enlisted men, but was particularly angry about wasting his time and medical talents having to go through basic training in order to serve as a doctor. While stationed in Florida he was assigned to rescue pilots downed in the swamps during training. Even though this was not combat duty, there were the dangers of snake bites and extreme heat. According to Sarah, this service weakened his heart. He returned home and practiced medicine in Brunswick County. He was forced into semi-retirement in the early 1930s due to a heart condition, which, at that time, was treated by forced inactivity (Davey 1990). Although Bernard was bedridden, he lived until the age of 80 (Appendix 3).
Sarah remembers that she and Bill spent much of their time playing together, usually playing dolls at Sarah's insistence. She said that even as a young child Bill was always kind and cooperative, and since she was older, she would sometimes be mean to him. Sarah liked to dress him as a girl. She would then go downstairs and announce him as a girl. He then had to descend the stairs. He always agreed to it, but unhappily so. When he was about four or five, she laughed at his dress; he hit her hand so that she could not tie a bow in his hair. They always liked each other's presents, so one Christmas their grandmother sent Bill a doll and Sarah a tool set. That year they played happily with each other's presents (Davey 1990).
Bill's mother, Sallie, was 90 years old when she described his childhood in a 16 June 1967 letter to Verner W. Clapp for a biography of her son that Clapp was then planning to write. She began "You will need patience in reading what I've written and as an old darkey said to me once 'Miss Sallie you have to be pationable [sic] with old folks and this applies to me now" (S. A. Barrow 1967). Sallie remembers her son in his childhood as an artisan, and a businessperson too, who worked with paper in one way or another. Bill made all the presents he gave because he would not spend what money he had.
He loved making all kinds of articles with paper and mucilage.... One . . . was a paper rattle, box-shaped and I reckon it was fitted with rocks to create the noise it was supposed to have; . . .
William loved making newspapers with small sheets of paper; he could do fine printing and would copy news items from the daily paper; he could be amused for hours making them and [he] would like to be off to himself. I would buy copies of his papers. When he would play "peddler" I always had to buy from his pack. He knew how peddlers used to go through the country areas with their packs (S. A. Barrow 1967).
Bill was not only interested in paper-related activities, according to his mother, he also engaged in large, complex building tasks. "I don't know how he became interested in building a railroad, unless seeing at times the Virginian Rail Road . . . under construction just a few miles from our place. He built the railroad in . . . [a] body of pines, he used ordinary nails in fastening the ties in the ground" (S. A. Barrow 1967).
He usually had a dog for a pet. When Bill was a little older, he became an avid equestrian. Sarah remembered that as a youth, he had a formal riding outfit and a horse named "Bob" (Davey 1990).
In discussing Bill's personality, his mother said that "He was a little sensitive and [his] feelings [were] easily hurt...." He also seemed to have a sense of the dramatic that developed early, according to his mother's recollection. "He was still young and wearing wash suits which I made....He was in the yard, playing and working on some project and I sent his sister to tell him to come in and try the suit on I was then making. She came almost gleefully to say 'William doesn't want to come and he says he is going in the cold dark pines.' I sent her back with another message to come, and she found him sitting on a stump just on the edge of the cold dark pines" (S. A. Barrow 1967).
Sallie's description of Bill's character yields some insight into his relationship with his father as well as his reticence, a trait not usually seen by others. "To me his most outstanding trait was his respect for another person's property....He came to me for some [mucilage] and I told him I didn't have any but his father had some in his office and I didn't think he would mind his [Bill's] using some of it. Immediately he said, 'Daddy hasn't said I could' and refused to use it. I think he has carried this ideal through life" (S. A. Barrow 1967).
Bernard followed the plantation tradition of private tutorial education and, during Sarah and Bill's elementary school years, allowed only live-in governesses or tutors to teach his children. Their first governess was from Alabama. Sarah thinks that fact accounted for Bill's accent and slow pace of speech, which was noticeably different from her own (Davey 1990). Bill spoke as if he were from the Deep South (R. G. Barrow 1987). Their childhood, although extremely isolated at home with their tutors, was busy and interesting according to Sarah. They studied in the mornings and had the afternoons free for play. They were never lonely or unoccupied. During World War I, when their father was in the army, Bill went briefly to public school. the local public schools of the time taught no Latin, they stressed instead English language and math. Bill, according to Sarah, was gifted in math and sciences (Davey 1990).
During Bill's prep school years at Randolph-Macon Academy, he lived with his cousin, Albert Barrow, also an Academy alumnus, in Albert's home, a plantation named Mount Saint Angelo that was close to Sweet Briar, Virginia. They were cousins on both sides of the family. Bill's mother, Sallie, and her sister, Lucy Archer, both married into the Barrow family. Sarah thinks that these Archer family descendents were the best of the "Barrow lot....Good genes make good people." Sarah used Albert as an example of the Barrow-Archer genes: she said Albert was a business "genius," who made three fortunes, lost two, and still managed to die rich. He had to sell Mount Saint Angelo during one of the bad times, but eventually bought it back (Davey 1990).
Following graduation from the Academy, Bill attended Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia, from 1923 to 1925 (Alumni Profiles 1960, 14). an indifferent student, he was interested primarily in the laboratory classes in the sciences of physics and chemistry, and much less interested in language or other humanities courses (R. G. Barrow 1987). Many years later he commented on the effect that his science courses had upon him: "Dr. Dolley [physical sciences professor at Randolph-Macon from the 1920s to the 1950s] was the man that got me really interested in [doing] research" (Alumni Profiles 1960, 14).
According to Sarah, Bill did not want to be a lawyer or doctor and devoted less effort to study than to his social life. After just 2 years, he ended his college education and immediately went to work for his cousin (Davey 1990). He remained close to Albert and to Albert's memory, so much so that when he died in 1967 he was buried in Albert's family plot in Blackstone, Virginia.
Sarah believed that the brevity of Bill's formal education was due primarily to his own wishes. She felt that their father made a reasonable decision to pay for her to finish Goucher College instead of forcing him to remain in school when Bill wanted only to go into business (Davey 1990). Bill's wife, Ruth, felt differently. According to Ruth, Bill "never forgave his father for not giving him a proper education." Ruth thought that he quit college because his educational background was not good enough for him to make a success of college. "His sister . . . [was] sent . . . to Latin school in Baltimore. and I always felt that he thought he got a raw deal. [After] five years . . . of Latin school . . . she went to Goucher College. of course, she got a good background before she went there. She finished at Goucher. He never got anything like that. He always wished he'd got something like that. It might have been better for him" (R. G. Barrow 1987).
Despite these negative comments, Ruth affirmed Sarah's assertion that Bill's relationship with his father was positive. Physically Bill resembled his father; both were also considered handsome. in family photographs, Bill and his father were usually unsmiling. Sarah concluded that "they . . . looked grim, but were . . . very funny and jolly". Both were serious about and dedicated to their respective vocations (Davey 1990).
Bill gave credit to his father for his initial interest in document restoration. a newspaper article in the Richmond (Virginia) Times Dispatch about the opening of his restoration shop in the Virginia State Library stated that Bill had followed his father's interest in rare books and chemistry into the field of document restoration (Barrow invents unusual job [1940]). Ruth confirmed "They always enjoyed talking with each other. His father got him interested in looking up records. After the war [World War I] . . . he had lots of time to talk to Bill. That's the impression I got. and his dad loved to talk. He was bedridden most of that time. and we'd go out there [to the family home] lots of times on weekends. He was very close to his mother and father and he had to take care of them. His father couldn't do anything" (R. G. Barrow 1987).
Whether or not Bill resented his father's decisions about his education, it is easy to imagine that he felt some inferiority to his better-educated colleagues. Ruth also commented that he never stopped studying. "After he studied [bookbinding in Washington, D.C.] he kept reading and trying to find out what he could. He kept going back to Washington and worked with the National Bureau of Standards. and he just studied and kept up with things . . . [wrote and talked] to people....that's how he learned." Later he studied French because of laminator sales in Belgium, and he studied English to improve his writing (R. G. Barrow 1987).
From 1925 to 1931, Bill worked for his cousin Albert manufacturing overalls and other work clothes. Barrow Corporation overalls went by the trade name of Red Diamond Pants and were sold by retailers including Montgomery Ward and J.C. Penney Company (Barrow Corporation [1930]). He trained initially in Lynchburg, Virginia in the factory nearest Mount Saint Angelo. From 1925 to 1927, he worked in each of the factory jobs from shipping clerk to cloth-cutter. After Lynchburg, he moved on to cutting room supervisor and assistant manager in the 150-worker factory in Tacoma, Washington. From there, he moved to the position of superintendent of the company's St. Louis factory, which employed 225 workers. By 1931, he was manager of the Barrow Corporation "Unit #2" factory of 75 workers in Oakland, California (Technical and occupational qualifications [1960]).
Management of the garment factory involved detailed record keeping of piecework, calculation of weekly wages, oversight of the flow of materials into and shipment of garments from the factory, and the selling of rags, coincidentally for the making of paper. His handwritten list of managerial duties gives a vivid picture of exactly what was meant by the term "management" in a Barrow Corporation factory of the early 1930s:
MANAGER'S DUTIES
1. Open Mail.
2. Write up orders and take to shipping department.
3. Answer letters, etc.
4. Inspect various departments, talking to foreman of each department.
NOON
[5.] See that shipping department is progressing OK (Barrow Corporation [Notebook] [1930]).
The majority of workers in these factories were women who were paid by the piece for sewn garments. Each seam, pocket, and button was considered a separate operation and each sewing operation was priced at rates ranging from a few cents down to tenths and even hundredths of a cent. These operations were recorded and tallied meticulously to calculate wages. The tallying was the manager's primary duty. Barrow's very detailed instructions, in his own handwriting, suggest his need for guidance as well as accuracy.
PAY ROLL INSTRUCTIONS
[1] Arrange the pay roll books by number....
[2] Be sure the machine is clear before you start adding.
[3] Use the repeat lever whenever possible; also upon finding two rows (10) of tickets move over one place to the right and place the number on the machine as these steps will save considerable time.
[4] When adding operation 13, 14, 15[,] and coat operation 25 point off four places to the right as these figures deal with fractions of cents.
[5] In case of error in placing number on the machine, you will release same by pushing the total or sub-total lever (Barrow Corporation [Notebook] [1930]).
Bill's garment factory experience provided the business training for his restoration shop. He learned the garment industry beginning at the ground level just as he was to learn document restoration. Like the science laboratory courses in college, the garment business was the kind of hands-on training that best suited his learning style. He probably learned to record details of procedures and findings from his laboratory courses and applied these recording techniques to his business practices. He recorded factory management procedures in his neat handwriting in well-organized notebooks. The notebook he used for the three factories he managed was very similar to his shop records and to his early research records, especially in his data organization and graphic display techniques.
The Barrow Corporation was part of one of the fortunes lost by his cousin Albert. The clothing factories went bankrupt early in the Great Depression. in 1931, Bill left Oakland, California without a job, but not without resources, since he made his way back home to Brunswick County initially travelling by boat through the Panama Canal (Davey 1990). He said he tried unsuccessfully to find work all along his route home from California. He was forced to invent his next career because of this failure to find other employment (Barrow invents unusual job . . . [1940]).
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