Eliam Eliakim Barney

Before Eliam Barney became a manufacturer, he taught. That earlier profession was substantial: preparation at New York academies, graduation from Union College in 1831, and appointments at Lowville, Granville, and Dayton. His later wealth can obscure the years in which his livelihood depended upon conveying knowledge rather than controlling a factory. Education remained one of his principal public commitments after industry changed the scale of his resources.

He was the son of Benjamin Barney and Nancy Potter, born in northern New York in 1807. Local histories disagree about his exact birth date and location, but agree on his migration to Ohio in the early 1830s. In Dayton he led the academy and later the Cooper Female Seminary. The seminary places him within the nineteenth-century history of women’s education, although its curriculum, admission practices, and pupils require separate study before his role can be described as an emancipatory project. Providing instruction to girls did not by itself dissolve the social limits placed upon them. [1,2]

Periods in the lumber business connected his educational career to a different set of practical skills. In 1849 he became involved with the manufacturing venture that developed into the Dayton Car Works, initially as a partner still occupied with teaching. The enterprise changed names as its partners changed; it eventually became Barney, Smith & Company and then an incorporated manufacturing company. Its growth depended on the expansion of American railroads. Passenger and freight cars turned timber, metal, skilled labor, and investment into the equipment of a rapidly extending transportation system.

Barney’s interests also included banking, hydraulic power, and the cultivation of catalpa for timber. The tree was a practical concern, promoted through correspondence and printed discussion, not an ornamental afterthought. His overlapping interests show the connections between natural materials, manufacturing, and the infrastructure of a developing industrial city. They also establish the limits of any account that treats the Barney fortune as an unexplained inheritance. It began in enterprises whose profits depended upon work performed by many people beyond the family named on the company.

His Baptist affiliations and support for Denison University linked business success to religious and educational institutions. He served as a university trustee and endowed professorships. After his death in December 1880, his son Eugene continued the association; Denison’s science hall, given by Eugene in 1894, honored his father. The family’s name became part of the institution’s physical landscape. Such memorials preserve philanthropy more readily than they preserve the conditions under which the donated money was earned. [1,3]

Eliam was Albert Clifford Barney’s father and Natalie and Laura’s paternal grandfather. His relationship to Natalie is genealogical, rather than a demonstrated influence upon her literary ideas. She was a small child when he died. Nevertheless, his business history belongs to the material explanation of the opportunities later available to the family: travel, property, artistic study, and the possibility of pursuing work without depending upon its immediate income. The Constellation’s freedoms had an industrial history. Following that history enlarges the account beyond the exceptional granddaughter to the institutions and labor that helped sustain her world. [2,4]