Gabriel Thomas Barbee (31 July 1814–24 September 1908), first president of the Farmers' Alliance of Virginia, was the second of six sons and third of twelve children of Andrew Russell Barbee and Nancy Britton Barbee. The sculptor William Randolph Barbee was a younger brother. Barbee was born at Hawsbury, in the part of Culpeper County that in 1833 became Rappahannock County. His father, a prosperous farmer, was appointed the first postmaster of Hawsbury in 1832. In the mid-1830s Barbee moved to Petersburg in Hardy County (now in Grant County, West Virginia), where he operated a hotel and, with his elder brother, George B. Barbee, and another partner, ran a general mercantile business. On 10 May 1838 he married Mary E. Burns, of Hardy County. They had three daughters.

In 1847 Barbee won election to the Senate of Virginia, representing Hardy, Page, Shenandoah, and Warren Counties. A Democrat, Barbee served on the influential Committee on Privileges and Elections and on joint committees on the militia, the penitentiary, and the treasurer's accounts. A new state constitution rearranged senatorial districts for the 1852 elections, and he did not return to office.

Not long thereafter Barbee moved to Baltimore, where he was unsuccessful in a wholesale business. He returned to Hardy County and resumed his mercantile pursuits, although he gave his occupation as farmer in 1860. As a Southern sympathizer, Barbee left that Unionist county shortly after the Civil War began, and by 1863 he had settled in Bridgewater. During the war he held several minor positions, including that of purchasing agent for the Confederate government.

In 1867 Barbee purchased a large brick house in Bridgewater and operated it as a hotel. During the 1870s and 1880s two of his daughters conducted a private school for girls there. The building survives and is known as the Barbee House. Barbee served as mayor of Bridgewater from May 1877 to May 1879, a period when dissident Democrats organized as Readjusters and formed an alliance with reform-minded Republicans. He supported the Readjusters and made the Bridgewater Journal, which he purchased in October 1880, an advocate of the cause. As an editor he won a reputation, even with partisan Democrats, for good sense and fair dealing. Barbee sold the newspaper in the aftermath of a statewide Democratic victory in November 1883. Earlier that month Governor William E. Cameron, a Readjuster, had appointed him to the board of visitors of the University of Virginia, a post he held until 1886.

Barbee was a founder of the National Farmers' Alliance in Virginia. Early in 1887 the alliance sent Joseph S. Barbee, Gabriel Barbee's youngest brother, from Texas to establish a presence in Virginia. He stationed himself on his arrival at his brother's home in Bridgewater. Not long thereafter, Gabriel Barbee assumed the role of organizing county alliances in the state. He created the first unit of the alliance at Ottobine in Rockingham County in September 1887, and in November helped to establish there Virginia's first county alliance. Representatives from other counties met at Luray in 1888, set up the Farmers' Alliance of Virginia, and elected Barbee president. Organizing continued, and all but a handful of counties sent representatives to the meeting at Lynchburg in August 1890. Ineligible for reelection as president, Barbee became the organization's treasurer. He also established the West Virginia Farmers' Alliance at Charleston in August 1890.

Leaders of the National Farmers' Alliance met in Ocala, Florida, in December 1890 and drafted political demands, bringing into being the People's, or Populist, Party. Barbee attended the convention and served on its credentials committee. Although political organizing and campaigning reduced Barbee's role somewhat, he continued to contribute to the party's journal, the Richmond Virginia Sun, which on 12 October 1892 honored him as "the Father of the Alliance in Virginia." At age eighty Barbee ran for Congress as a Populist candidate in 1894, but he received only twenty-two votes.

Known as Colonel Barbee, he gave many of his friends intricately carved canes that he crafted as a hobby. Gabriel Thomas Barbee had survived his wife and daughters when he died of senile decay on 24 September 1908 at the home of a son-in-law in Romney, West Virginia. He was buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Bridgewater.

Sources Consulted:
Barbee-Summers family Bible record, Accession 27917, Library of Virginia; Elisabeth B. Johnson and C. E. Johnson Jr., Rappahannock County, Virginia (1981), 120–121; Elvin Lycurgus Judy, History of Grant and Hardy Counties, West Virginia (1951), 5, 103; Richmond Enquirer, 8 May 1847; Harrisonburg Rockingham Register, 20 May, 21 Oct. 1880, 6 Dec. 1883, 19 May 1887, 21 Mar. 1889; Richmond Whig, 22 Oct. 1883; Bridgewater Journal, 30 Nov. 1883; William DuBose Sheldon, Populism in the Old Dominion: Virginia Farm Politics, 1885–1900 (1935), 16, 29–30, 109; Richmond Virginia Sun, 12 Oct. 1892; Bridgewater Herald, 12 Oct., 9 Nov. 1894; diary of Henry Smaltz (Smals), 1873–1890, James Madison University Library, Harrisonburg, Va.; Bridgewater Sesquicentennial Edition, 1835–1985 (1985); portrait in Bridgewater College Library; obituaries in Harrisonburg Daily Times and Romney Hampshire Review, both 30 Sept. 1908, and Staunton Augusta County Argus, 6 Oct. 1908.

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Gordon W. Miller.

How to cite this page:
Gordon W. Miller,"Gabriel Thomas Barbee (1814–1908)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 1998 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.php?b=Barbee_Gabriel_Thomas, accessed [today's date]).

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