1888 - William Wilcox Barnard -Tested Seeds

William Wilcox Barnard appears to have a business minded man who found his way into the seed business through his office skills,  rather than his experience with plants or seeds.  He did like his cannas as an older man, so maybe he grew into the business.

 I like him for his choice in the catalog cover art for his 1892 catalog!  I wonder if he picked the style.  They never had another interesting cover as far as I am concerned.  He had boring ads, too.  Then again, I can't find much about him, so I may be wrong.

The first catalog I found online (the 1892) is very whimsical.  The rest from the prime period of lithographed covers are colorful and unexciting, the minimum of what I expect from an acceptable seed catalog cover. 

 

At the age of 18 he got a job as clerk for the D. S. Heffron Seed Company, on Clark Street, under  D. S. Heffron.  He later became bookkeeper and cashier for Hiram Sibley and Company, who were pioneer seedsmen and owners of a warehouse.  In 1888, under the firm name of W. W. Barnard & Company, he purchased the garden seed department of that business after Sibley died.   (Sibley was a very interesting guy!)

"In 1905, this business was consolidated with Goodwin, Harris and Company as The W. W. Barnard Company, dealers in seeds and stock food.  Mr. Barnard was made president and treasurer and continued as such until his death, March 10, 1921.  His connection with the seed business in Illinois covers about fifty years."

1892

"The year Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-One has marked the passing of many people who have been Chicogoans since the period preceding the Chicago Fire.  In thinking of them, and of the past years, we are reminded that Chicago has not long been at its present point of development.    The growth thus far attained has come, quite largely, through the combined efforts of the people who have lived here for the last fifty or more years.  Among those men recently deceased, whose names are especially worthy of mention in a record covering a long period of Chicago's industrial progress is the late William Wilcox Barnard.

William Wilcox Barnard was born on a farm in Chicago, very near the present site of his late home in Beverly Hills, on July 4, 1856.  His parents were William and Miranda (Wilcox) Barnard.  They are numbered among the earliest residents of that section of the city for the mother came here in 1844, and the father in 1846.  In more recent years their hoestead farm and is now subdivided and now forms a portion of Beverly Hills.  William W. Barnard, as a boy, attended the Englewood High School and Bryant and Stratton's Business College."

Excerpts from Historical Encyclopedia of Illinois, with commemorative biographies, Vol 2, 1926

Here is another obituary.  The company got slammed in 921 as the vice-president died a month before Barnard!