Joseph E. Farrar (7 November 1830–9 March 1892), builder and civic leader, was born in Charlottesville and was the son of James Farrar and Critty Hawkins Farrar, both of whom were free Blacks. References to him early in life do not include a middle name or middle initial and later references do not indicate what the middle initial stood for or why or when he began to use it. Farrar learned to read and write and late in the 1840s began training as a carpenter with a builder in Charlottesville. About 1858 or 1859 he moved to Richmond, where he married Rachel Willis Grey, the daughter of a free barber. They had three sons, one daughter, and another child who died young.
Farrar quickly established himself as a respected contractor in Richmond. After his arrest in September 1863 for receiving stolen property and conviction the following month, white and Black residents of Charlottesville and Richmond (including one of the judges of the criminal court) petitioned the governor for a pardon. Having been sentenced to be sold into slavery, Farrar received a pardon on 2 November. After the Civil War, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands contracted with him to work on school buildings in the city. He believed in the importance of education in improving the lives of men, women, and children who had formerly been enslaved, and on 2 July 1867 a group that included Farrar, Ralza Morse Manly, and several other men received a charter for the Richmond Educational Association to establish a school to train African American teachers. The Richmond Normal and High School (Richmond Colored Normal School after 1870) opened in 1867 and was deeded to the city in 1876. A member of the association's board of directors, Farrar became vice president in 1868 and president in 1875.
Farrar was eager to help African Americans purchase their own homes after the Civil War, and in October 1868 he joined Peter Henry Woolfolk and several other men in establishing the Virginia Home Building Fund and Loan Association, of which he later served as president. Farrar began investing in real estate in 1867 when he purchased a lot on Fourth Street in what later became the city's Jackson Ward. During the next two decades he bought and sold several lots in the vicinity and erected houses on some of them, but it is not known how many buildings he constructed in Richmond. Farrar also repaired or constructed additions to local churches, and he built the gallows used to hang the notorious convicted murderer Thomas Judson Cluverius in 1887. By 1890 Farrar's Richmond real estate was valued at $8,500.
Having become a member of Ebenezer Baptist Church in 1862, Farrar was elected a deacon the following year and clerk in 1866. He served on committees of the regional Colored Shiloh Baptist Association beginning in 1867, and he regularly attended the annual meetings of the Virginia Baptist State Convention, which elected him assistant secretary in 1871. That year Farrar also became a member of the executive board, and in May 1876 he was elected treasurer, a position he held until his death. Early in the 1880s he joined a group of African Americans who believed that they and not white Baptists should take on responsibility for missions in Africa. The Board of Foreign Missions of the Baptist Foreign Mission Convention of the United States of America (National Baptist Convention after 1895) established its headquarters in Richmond, and Farrar served on its executive board from 1881 until 1887, when he was elected treasurer. In 1872 he represented Ebenezer Baptist Church on the board of trustees of the Friends' Asylum for Colored Orphans (later Friends' Association for Children), and in 1887 he was named to the board of managers of the Lynchburg Baptist Seminary (later Virginia University of Lynchburg).
In the aftermath of the Civil War Farrar joined other African Americans in fighting for their full civil and political rights as citizens. On 9 May 1865, less than a month after the fall of Richmond, he helped organize the Colored Men's Equal Rights League of Richmond, of which he was elected treasurer. During the autumn of 1867 Farrar attended the meetings that organized the Republican Party in Richmond. Earlier that year Congress had passed the Reconstruction Acts, placing Virginia under military rule and giving African Americans the right to vote and hold office. In May 1869 Farrar attended a convention of Black delegates that met in Richmond to oppose Virginia's readmission to the United States without assuring suffrage for Blacks. He was a member of the committee that prepared the resolutions calling for Republicans to ratify the new state constitution drafted in a convention that met in 1867–1868 and to work for the establishment of free public schools. In June 1869 radical Republicans nominated Farrar as one of nine candidates to represent the district of Richmond and Henrico County in the House of Delegates. After newspapers reported on his 1863 arrest, however, he was dropped from the ticket later that month.
Farrar did not return to politics until 1886, when the Richmond common council elected him to fill a vacant seat on 22 March. Two months later he was named a candidate for the common council on the reform ticket of the Knights of Labor, and he received the highest number of votes in Jackson Ward on 27 May. A member of the Reformers' caucus on the council, Farrar served on the committees on relief of the poor and on accounts and printing. He regularly attended the monthly meetings and offered several resolutions, including ones to appoint a city building inspector, to allow for a chaplain at the separate almshouses for Blacks and whites, and for the city to acquire five acres on Navy Hill for a park. Farrar did not run for reelection at the conclusion of his term in 1888, although he made an unsuccessful attempt to return to the common council as an Independent Republican in 1890.
Late in the 1880s Farrar retired from his contracting business, which he left in the hands of his sons. He continued to serve as a grand deacon of the United Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Ancient York Masons and as a director of the local Young Men's Christian Association. In 1888 he headed a committee that oversaw the African American exhibitions at the Virginia Agricultural, Mechanical and Tobacco Exposition, held in Richmond. Joseph E. Farrar died at his Richmond home on the night of 9 March 1892 and was buried at Cedarwood Cemetery, which later became part of Richmond's Barton Heights Cemeteries.
Sources Consulted: Birth and death dates on gravestone, Barton Heights Cemeteries, Richmond; will in Richmond City Chancery Court Will Book 5 (1891–1894): 75–78, Library of Virginia (LVA); Farrar's registration as a free negro in Free Negro register, 3 Dec. 1850, Albemarle Co. Free Negro and Slave Records, 1796–1870, LVA; 1863 trial record in Richmond City Hustings Court Minute Book 28 (1862–1863): 658, LVA; 1863 trial testimony and pardon application in Commonwealth v. Joseph Farro, 2–9 November 1863, John Letcher Executive Papers, Accession 36787, State Government Records Collection, LVA; biographical sketch and will in Farrar Family Papers, Earl Gregg Swem Library, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg; Luther Porter Jackson, Free Negro Labor and Property Holding in Virginia, 1830–1860 (1942), 91, note 49; Farrar's educational work can be found in Minutes of the Richmond Educational Association, 1867–1878, Ralza M. Manly Collection, City Records Office, Richmond Public Library, and Records of the Field Offices for the State of Virginia, Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, 1865–1872, Microfilm 1913, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.; Ebenezer Baptist Church (Richmond City) Records, 1858–1975, Accession 33482, Church Records Collection, LVA; Virginia Baptist State Convention Minutes, 1870–1892; Baptist Foreign Mission Convention of the United States of America Minutes, 1881–1891; C. Peter Ripley et al, eds., The Black Abolitionist Papers, vol. 5, The United States, 1859–1865 (1992), 324–329; Richmond Daily Dispatch, 1 Oct. 1867, 9 June 1869, 17 June 1869, 25 June 1869; Richmond Daily State Journal, 6 Jan. 1871; Richmond Whig, 23 Mar. 1886; Richmond Dispatch, 18 May 1886, 1 June 1886; Richmond Planet, 24 May 1890; obituaries in Richmond Dispatch, 10 Mar. 1892, 12 Mar. 1892, Richmond Planet, 12 Mar. 1892 (engraved portrait), and 19 Mar. 1892.
Engraving in Richmond Planet, 12 Mar. 1892.