The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
Corporation lawyer; president of the Fort Wayne & Northern Indiana Traction Company; author of the Barrett Law
On the record
James Madison Barrett was a son of Benjamin and Elizabeth Barrett, who came from Ireland in 1834. Educated at Mendota College and the University of Michigan, he read law in Chicago and at Princeton, Illinois, arrived in Fort Wayne on 22 February 1876, and was admitted to the Allen County bar. He practiced in association with Samuel L. Morris and R. C. Bell; after Bell’s death the firm continued as Barrett & Morris, and Edward G. Hoffman was afterward added to it — both Morris and Hoffman are profiled in this supplement. Elected state senator in 1886, Barrett was the author of the so-called Barrett law, and in the session of 1889 he was his party’s leader in the senate and chairman of the judiciary committee; among the acts he carried was the one that secured the location of the Indiana School for Feeble Minded Youth at Fort Wayne. He served for years as counsel to the companies that developed into the Fort Wayne & Northern Indiana Traction Company and then as the company’s president until 1917; it owned the Fort Wayne city traction system, a seven-mile extension to Robison Park, and two interurban lines. In 1896 Governor Claude Matthews appointed him a trustee of Purdue University. He was a director of the Packard Company, makers of Packard pianos. On 28 June 1877 he married Marian A. Bond, daughter of Charles D. Bond, a president of the Fort Wayne National Bank.
Sources: Griswold, Pictorial History of Fort Wayne, vol. II (1917), Barrett sketch, read first-hand. No second source reached for this profile.