The Biographical Dictionary of America/Barrows, William

​BARROWS, William, clergyman, was born at New Braintree, Mass., Sept. 19, 1815. He attended Phillips academy from 1834 to 1836, and was graduated from Amherst in 1840, after which he taught in St. Louis until 1843, when he entered the Union theological seminary. On the completion of his course in 1845 he was ordained in the Congregational ministry and installed at Norton, Mass. In 1850 he was placed over the church in Grantville, near Wellesley Hills. Thence he moved in 1856 to become pastor of the Old South church, Reading, Mass. In 1869 he was made secretary of the Congregational Sunday-school publishing society, and filled this office until 1873, when he was elected to the secretaryship of the Massachusetts home missionary society. He relinquished this work in 1880 to devote himself to the educational and religious wants of the western frontier, where he had already made eleven long tours. He was a lecturer on prehistoric America and on the colonial and pioneer history of the United States, and he wrote much on these subjects for periodicals. In 1869 he published: "Twelve Nights in a Hunter's Camp"; in 1875, "The Church and her Children," and in 1876, "Eight Weeks on the Frontier" (1876). In 1881 he accepted the pastorate of a church at New Braintree, where he remained until 1895 during which time he published: "Purgatory Doctrinally, Practically and Historically Opened," and "Oregon: the Struggle for Possession" (1884), of which the 8th edition was printed in 1888. In 1887 he issued "The Indian's Side of the Indian Question," and "The United States of Yesterday and of To-morrow." He was for seven years editor of the Congregational Review. He died Sept. 9, 1891.