EUGENE J. BARNEY, President of the Barney & Smith Manufacturing Company, was born in Dayton, Ohio, February 12, 1839. His education was limited to that received at the common and high schools. At the age of fifteen he entered the class of 1858 of Rochester University, but left college during the last term of the sophomore year, having, after persistent efort, induced his father to grant him permission to enter business. At the age of seventeen he entered the ofice of Rufus Dutton, a manufacturer of agricultural implements. At the age of twenty he took the general agency of a new cotton press for the States of Tennessee and Mississippi, and for three years was successfully engaged in introducing it throughout the South. Coming North, in 1860, he entered the Ohio Valley Bank, of Cincinnati, Ohio, as a clerk. During his connection with this large banking house, he was sent on important business to different parts of Ohio, Indiana, and Tennessee. At the end of two years he entered a banking house in Chicago. In February, 1862, he was married to Miss Belle Huffman, eldest daughter of W. P. Huffman, Esq., of Dayton. He was in business in Cincinnati for several years after his marriage, and removed to Dayton in 1866. Having saved several thousand dollars from the various enterprises in which he had been engaged, he purchased the interest of S. F. Woodsum in the firm of Barney, Smith & Company, now incorporated as the Barney & Smith (page 689) Manufacturing Company. In a year or two lie was appointed superintendent of the works, and upon Mr. Smith's retiring, on account of ill-health, he was made vice-president and superintendent. In 1880, after the death of his father, he was made president of the company, and has held the position ever since. Mr. Barney was a member of the First Regular Baptist Church of Dayton for some twenty years, and since then of the Linden Avenue Baptist Church. He is now president of the Barney & Smith Manufacturing Company, of the Dayton Manufacturing Company, and of the Cooper Hydraulic Company, and is a director of the Fourth National Batik, of the Union Safe Deposit Company, and of the Columbia Insurance Company, the Dayton Street Railroad Company, the Wisconsin Contral Railroad Company, and the Piqua and Troy Railroad Company. It will thus be seen that Mr. Barney is one of the most active, as he is one of the most successful, of Dayton's younger class of business men.
History of Dayton, Ohio 1889
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