Vintage

MILTON L. ALBERSTADT JR

Descendant of T. W. Farrar

THE ALABAMA YEARS OF

THOMAS W. FARRAR 

A Life of Leadership

 That Goes Terribly Wrong

by Milton L. Alberstadt, Jr. 

RESEARCHED AND WRITTEN BY

HIS GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GRANDSON, MILT ALBERSTADT JR. 

Thomas W. Farrar, the first Grand Master [of Alabama’s Masons,] was a highly respected man and Mason.  This is attested by the fact of his election to the highest office in the gift of his Brethren from among the distinguished body of men who composed the first Grand Lodge. He married Seraphine Bagneris, a French woman of high standing from Louisiana . . .   Descendants and relatives of Thomas W. Farrar reside in New Orleans, but they know little of him.  It is regretted that our data are so meager.

                                                             — Dudley Wright

                                                                     Gould’s History of Freemasonry

                                                                     Throughout the World, 1936, V, 33.

___________________________

HISTORY has not been kind to Thomas Wadsworth Farrar.

Yes, he was flawed.  Yes, his life ended tragically.  But as the quote above reveals, Thomas W. Farrar was highly regarded by early Alabamians.  People gravitated to him instinctively.  Thomas W. Farrar was one of the true pioneers in the earliest years of Jefferson County, Alabama.  Over and over during his public years, he was elected to positions of high responsibility and leadership in Alabama’s newborn organizations.

Unfortunately for those organizations and for Alabama, his detractors ultimately ruled the day.  Their memories were long and they were unbelievably unforgiving.  He deserves better than the callous dismissal he later received.  Today, the ten years that Farrar lived in Alabama—1820-1830—are all but forgotten, except, that is, in ways that invite derision and laughter.  Several examples are available; I’ll use just one:

In April 1887, almost 55 years after Farrar’s death and nearly a decade after the 1881 founding of Birmingham, a 595-page volume appeared, Jefferson County and Birmingham Alabama, Historical and Biographical.  Its lengthy fourth chapter on Jefferson County’s first lawyers was written by Birmingham’s then-mayor, A.O. Lane.  Here in its entirety is Mayor Lane’s assessment of Farrar:[1]

General Farrar came from North Carolina, and was about forty years old, corpulent, big- hearted, genial, and an epicure.  No dinner party was complete without him.  His appetite always relieved any deficiency of the caterer.  He had little energy, but, withal, was a good lawyer.

Thomas W. Farrar’s truly significant contributions to the early growth of Alabama have been reduced to a 45-word discussion of his love of food:  He was big-hearted, glutinous and lazy—but a good lawyer.

Mayor Lane fails to mention Farrar’s 1821 term as Jefferson County’s first county judge [the first not shared with another county]; Farrar’s founding that same year of Jefferson County’ first Masonic lodge, which Farrar heads from 1821-1823; Farrar’s consideration for election in 1822 as the first treasurer of the future University of Alabama; Farrar’s two terms, 1822 and 1824, representing Jefferson County in the Alabama House of Representatives; his three terms, in 1821, 1822 and 1824, as founder and first grand master of Alabama’s state-wide Grand Masonic Lodge; Farrar’s multiple years starting in 1821 as the first commanding general of the Alabama militia’s Second Division [He was the fourth-highest-ranking military officer in the State of Alabama]; Farrar’s whirlwind 11-day trek across Georgia and Alabama with Revolutionary War hero Marquis de Lafayette in 1825 as Alabama Governor Israel Pickens’ personal liaison; or Farrar’s determined effort to give the state its first comprehensive military code in 1826, a code ultimately named in his honor.  None of this was mentioned by Mayor Lane.

Nor was Farrar from North Carolina.  It was South Carolina.

In fact, almost all of Farrar’s activities in Alabama involved firsts of some sort.  But in terms of firsts, the real question is why would anyone, much less a mayor of Birmingham, want to demean Farrar’s achievements in the first place?  And why do it to a man who had been dead for 55 years?

To find out, I put back together again Thomas W. Farrar’s lost life piece by piece—every scrap of it; every fact, year by year, day by day, a life-sized jigsaw puzzle laid out in timeline form—and not just the Alabama years, his entire life.  Everything I found is included in the following two sections, the insignificant as well as the life changing.

What has emerged is a lengthy—very lengthy—record filled with fascinating detail, including “my” version of his Alabama biography appearing above.  Did I learn why Mayor Lane ridiculed him to the point of dismissal?  No, but I think it probably had something to do with Farrar’s ill-considered and little-known—but no doubt much whispered about—decision in 1826 to support himself as a professional gambler.  Today, we would call the acreage he purchased in 1826 on top of Shade’s Mountain “a gambler’s hideaway.”  Was that decision proper justification for Lane’s ridicule?  Perhaps some people of the time thought that it was.  Gambling was certainly illegal.  But it also should be noted that Lane once had served as editor of Birmingham’s Weekly Iron Age and I suspect his assessment reflected his love of gossip.

My timeline also uncovered Farrar’s “hidden” years in Alabama—the years from 1827-1830 after he dropped out of public view.  From a New Orleans library I learned how a Louisiana nephew rescued him from a certain plunge into financial ruin in 1829 as a result of his growing debts; how that same nephew generously and completely financed Farrar’s final move from Alabama to New Orleans in 1830 and paid for his subsequent lifestyle in New Orleans; how a bitter lawsuit between his widow and his brother-in-law within two months of his sudden death in 1832 destroyed his meager estate—it’s all there.  Also there is the crown jewel of his family genealogy: documentation for his first cousin relationship to President Thomas Jefferson, two generations separated.

Am I fully satisfied with the result?  Yes and no.  A number of small things still are unknown—the correct year of his birth, for example; I have been unable to come within five years of stating it with certainty.

I also suspect, but cannot prove, that Thomas was not named for his father, Thomas Farrar.  [His father had no middle name.]  Instead, like his younger brother Charles Cotesworth Pinckney Farrar, Thomas Wadsworth Farrar may have been named for someone his parents admired.  At the time of Thomas W.’s birth, Thomas Farrar—the father—was active in South Carolina politics and South Carolina had a state senator named Thomas Wadsworth.  Could this have been the source of Thomas’s unusual name?  As I have said, I have no proof of my suspicion.  Perhaps that can be forgiven; so much more has been recovered from the historical record.  The “meager” data no longer are meager.

There is now concrete substantiation for the exact day of his death—a detective story in itself.  It seems that within a month of his demise his wife began concealing, deliberately and almost successfully, its true date.  And it was deliberate.  Given the circumstances of his death, her actions were completely understandable.

I researched all of this in the course of assembling a larger-than-life portrait of Farrar, my ancestor, gleaned from interminable hours on the Internet and follow-up road trips to Birmingham, Alabama, New Orleans, Louisiana, and Pendleton, South Carolina, all from Houston, Texas.  Thomas Wadsworth Farrar is my great-great-great-grandfather.

I suspect only two people in this world ever will take the time to wade through all of this interminable detail, as interesting as it is to me.  One of them IS me.

The other?—only someone with my obsessive determination to know the whole truth.

For everyone else, recognize this document for what it is: research to right a wrong.  Thomas W. Farrar was a complicated person.  Hopefully we can now understand him better.

Questions?  Comments?   My e-mail address is This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .  

  ———

About the Author-Researcher

MILTON L. ALBERSTADT JR. began a career in public affairs helping to explain the manufacture of NASA’s SATURN V rocket that in 1969 launched the first American astronauts from Florida to the moon.  Now retired, he has been a public relations manager for Boeing, an advertising manager for Volkswagen and a television news producer for Exxon.  He is the great-great-great grandson of Thomas Wadsworth Farrar through Farrar’s daughter, Marie Stephanie Farrar.  His master of science in journalism degree in 1962 is from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Evanston, Illinois.

(continued in Part II)