Local woman to honor ancestor’s history with gravestone dedication more than 160 years after his death

Rosie French holds the family Bible from around 1840, of her great-great-grandfather Rev. Francis Barker. Barker served as a doctor and as a missionary with his wife Elizabeth Churchill at the Shawnee Mission in Kansas before moving to Lawrence. Their burial site at Oak Hill never had a gravestone, but in a ceremony Saturday one will be dedicated to the family.

Rosie French doesn’t know whether her great-great-grandfather, Rev. Francis Barker, ever had a proper gravestone. He was buried in 1863 at Lakeview Cemetery, but, when the Kansas River changed course in 1871, threatening his and others’ graves at Lakeview, Barker was moved to his final resting place at Oak Hill Cemetery.

Barker’s wife, one of his sons and two of his grandchildren, French says, never had gravestones, either. At least not to her knowledge. But on Saturday, approximately 160 years after arriving in Lawrence, the Barkers — and their pioneering patriarch, especially — will finally get their due.

French, joined by a handful of family members and a few local historians, will dedicate her great-great-grandfather’s new gravestone Saturday at 2 p.m. at Oak Hill Cemetery.

“They suffered such hardship, and never once wavered from their duty, even having eight children,” French says of her great-great-grandparents, Massachusetts natives who met and later married on the Kansas plains in 1839.

For French, who grew up hearing tales of her ancestors’ hardships and adventures in pioneer-era Lawrence, Saturday’s dedication ceremony represents a crucial link to the past. Barker, an ordained minister, physician, teacher and abolitionist, played an important role in Lawrence’s early history, French says, and she wants his legacy remembered.

Rev. Francis Barker used this mortar and pestle, at left, to mix up medicines used at the Shawnee Mission for members of the Shawnee Tribe, when he was both a doctor and a missionary there. His wife Elizabeth’s friendship diary from 1931, brought with her to the Shawnee Mission, is pictured at upper right.

Born to a wealthy family in Hanson, Massachusetts in 1806, Barker made his way to Kansas after graduating from the Newton Theological Institute in 1837. Against his family’s wishes, Barker headed west to the Kansas territory, where he had been appointed to the Shawnee Baptist Mission in what is now Johnson County.

There, he fell in love with Elizabeth Churchill, a teacher at the mission. The two married and had eight children born at the mission, two of whom died in infancy.

But Barker, a staunch abolitionist who reportedly managed to free two slave couples by purchasing them from their masters, had antagonized other missionaries with his progressive views, and at some point between 1855 and 1857, he and his family left the mission to settle permanently in the Lawrence area.

In Lawrence, Barker’s achievements included the establishment, with the donation of his land, of a community school.

“His dying wish was that it was to be used only for education or religious purposes,” says French, who doesn’t know what happened to the schoolhouse built on her great-great-grandfather’s land, which by all accounts was near the present-day Lecompton township.

The school, which opened two years after his death, was originally segregated, with white students and black students attending separately three months out of the year. It was desegregated in 1867, predating the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision by more than 80 years.

Katie Armitage, a longtime local historian and the author of the 2010 book “Lawrence Survivors of Quantrill’s Raid,” says Barker’s imprint on Kansas history is not to be ignored.

Armitage, who worked for many years as a researcher at the Watkins Museum of History and continues to volunteer there part-time, was manning the museum’s front desk one afternoon about three years ago when French and her granddaughter stopped by for a visit.

That was the first she’d ever heard of Barker, Armitage says, but since then she’s been fascinated by French’s tales of her pioneering ancestor. Eventually, she said she’d like to enter Barker’s story into an archive at the Watkins Museum and at KU’s Spencer Research Library for future historians.

“We have, to my knowledge, not a lot of families who can trace their ancestry back five generations to the founding of Lawrence,” says Armitage, who plans to attend Saturday’s dedication ceremony. “I just think the more we know about the lives and what happened to these early settlers, it just makes for a richer history.”

French’s grandchildren will be the seventh generation to recount Barker’s story and “carry this through the years,” French says. A few of them, she says, will be in attendance Saturday at Oak Hill Cemetery.

French’s mother, Ruth Ward, had wanted to honor her ancestors with a proper gravestone for a long time, French says. But Ward, who passed away in 2003, never got around to it. French herself had hoped for at least 10 years to one day see a gravestone installed at her family’s burial site, but life got in the way.

Now, with the gravestone ready for dedication, French says she’s glad to finally honor her late relatives — including her mother, a devout Christian who kept the Barker family history alive over the years, French says.

“She was a tiny woman who was shy and timid, but I think she’d raise her hands and say ‘hallelujah,'” French says when asked what her mother might think of the gravestone dedication.

French also wants her grandchildren and great-children to remember the sacrifices their ancestors made. If not for her, French says, her great-great-grandfather’s story might be lost in time.

Not anymore.

“He’s a little speck in the territorial history of our country and state, but it’s that speck that grows and grows and expands,” French says of Barker. “Respect, work hard and never give up.”