One of the more interesting figures associated with the founding of Columbus was Dr. B.C. Barry.
Dr. Barry was said to have arrived in Columbus in late June 1819. He opened a medical practice that received national recognition, played a role in the laying out of Columbus and became involved in statewide politics, but he died in 1825 at the young age of 36.
The future site of Columbus was first settled in the fall of 1817, but until mid-1819 it was only a few scattered families. It was mid-June 1819 that increasing numbers of people began moving to the townsite at the Military Road’s Tombigbee ferry crossing. By the fall 1819 the settlement had taken on the appearance of a town. Thinking the settlement’s location was in Alabama, it was the Alabama Legislature that first recognized the site as the Town of Columbus in two December 1819 legislative acts.
Among those early arrivals in the summer of 1819 were B.C. Barry and his brother Richard. By 1821 B.C. had constructed a two-story frame building where the Varsity building is now located at Main and Fourth Street North. His doctor’s office was on the ground floor and the Masonic Lodge occupied the second floor. Also in 1821, Richard had constructed a two-story frame hotel, which stood where the Gilmer Hotel was later built.
Dr. B.C. Barry may have been a frontier doctor, but in summer 1821, a successful surgery he and Dr. Henderson performed on a patient at Barry’s Columbus office made national news. The account of the operation was first carried in The Mississippi State Gazette of Natchez on July 14, 1821, and it later appeared in newspapers from St. Louis to Boston. According to the Natchez paper:
“Interesting Operation
On the 25th of March …, Doctors Henderson and Barry of Columbus performed an operation of Lithotomy (removal of kidney or Gall stones) on Tishee Mingo, Chief speaker of the Chickasaw nation. They extracted nineteen separate cohuti, weighing in the whole between two and three ounces. The patient is supposed to be in his 63rd year, and was much emaciated by the disease and very far exhausted by the operation. His recovery has been rapid, and he at this time is considered out of danger. [communicated by a spectator.]”
B.C. Barry’s community involvement was much more than just medicine. He was one of the commissioners who in 1821 laid out the plan for Columbus. The commissioners, who served as the first governing body of Columbus, decided on three east-west streets and three north-south crossing streets. The three east-west running streets were Military (Second Avenue North), Broad Street (Main Street) and Washington Street (College Street). The crossing streets were called West Street (Third Street), Center Street (Fourth Street) and East Street (Fifth Street).
Barry served on the board of trustees of Franklin Academy. In 1824 he was serving as secretary for the Eastern Board of Medical Censors for the State of Mississippi, which was Mississippi’s physicians and surgeons licensing board. Also, in 1824 Barry was listed as a Mississippi presidential elector for Amdrew Jackson.
In 1825 Barry ran for lieutenant governor. The election was in August, and Natchez newspapers on Aug. 15 announced that G.C. Brandon had been elected after defeating Barry by 1,884 votes and having carried seven counties to Barry’s five. On Aug. 17, 1825, Barry died of “Bilious fever, after an illness of seven weeks.”
He was buried in the 1820s Tombigbee Graveyard, which was located on the northern part of the block where Riverview is now. The graves there were relocated to Friendship Cemetery in the mid-1800s.
Shortly before his death, Barry had started construction on a new house which was located on the southwest corner of Fifth Street South and College Street, now the location of Leadership Plaza. Claims filed in his estate for the building materials of the house allowed the late Sam Kaye to reconstruct the appearance of Barry’s house, which was a 16-by-40-foot frame dwelling with a 10-foot ceiling and eight windows with shutters.
The house site was close to what was the early 1820s route of the Columbus-Pickensville Road. Barry was involved in a mail contract between Columbus and Tuscaloosa along that road at the time of his death. It is interesting that Leadership Plaza sits on the site where in 1825 one of Columbus’ earliest community leaders was building his house.
Thanks to Carolyn Kaye for helping with research.
Rufus Ward is a Columbus native a local historian. E-mail your questions about local history to Rufus at [email protected].
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