Friends remembered Julia Barkley last week as an artist who lived to paint, a crusader who wasn’t afraid to stick her neck out and a woman who was deeply involved in the community and world around her. Barkley, 81, an Annandale resident for more than 50 years, died Tuesday, Nov. 22, at the Benedictine Health Care Center in Minneapolis after a long struggle against amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease. An obituary appears on page 2. Barkley and her husband, Dayton, raised four children and owned and operated Dayton’s Furniture Store from 1949 until his death in 1978. Her longtime friends recalled how Barkley became a late-blooming painter, helped save the Thayer Hotel from demolition, was a founding member of Minnesota Pioneer Park, worked with the Annandale Improvement Club to beautify the city, became involved in spirituality groups at Clare’s Well, established the Red Hat Society here and protested the Iraq War. “She loved life and she lived to paint,” said Elizabeth Hood Anderson, Barkley’s close friend and painting companion for 30 years. Barkley was the furniture store’s interior designer but didn’t receive her interior design degree until 1974 after many years of classes at the University of Minnesota. At one point she was required to take a painting class, though she had no interest in it, Anderson said. “It opened a whole new world for her,” she said. “When she got into the class she just came alive and she said it was the most liberating experience of her life.” Barkley started out painting very abstract works, at one point pouring car enamel onto large aluminum sheets. “She got some gorgeous effects from that,” Anderson said, but the paint was toxic and she stopped using it. She later used oil paints, and her latest works were watercolors. Besides being shown around Minnesota, Barkley’s colorful paintings have been displayed in New York, Chicago, Santa Fe, N.M., and Japan, where one on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima was exhibited in the Tokyo Fine Arts Museum and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Garden Hall. For many years, Barkley returned to her native South Dakota each summer for about a week to teach painting classes to older adults, Anderson said. The location was what Barkley called her “dome home,” an eight-sided house in Custer, S.D., which she enlarged to accommodate student boarders. Barkley painted up until a year before her death, Anderson said, and she was celebrating life in her colorful last works. Some of them are on display at the Snooty Fox gallery in Annandale. “I dearly loved her,” Anderson said. “I’m going to miss her terribly. She’s a remarkable woman. She really was.” Friend of 60 years Mildred Shadduck, wife of the late Nobel Shadduck, said she knew Barkley for nearly 60 years. Both women and their families were close, she said. Shadduck credited Barkley with saving the Thayer, built in 1895, from the wrecking ball in the early 1980s. “She had a big battle about that and she did save it.” Barkley was good at that kind of thing, she said. “If there was something she believed in, she didn’t mind sticking her neck out about it.” Longtime Barkley friends Jeanne Roth and Marilyn Gordon added that Barkley headed up a hotel preservation group, which got the building placed on the national register of historic places and obtained an injunction forbidding the city from tearing it down. Roth was also a member of the group. The hotel is now known as Thayer’s Historic Bed ’n Breakfast. Barkley, her son Blaine and Nobel Shadduck were founding members of Minnesota Pioneer Park when it was established in 1972. Julia Barkley remained active in the park and was on the board of directors at the time of her death, former park president Gordon said. It was while serving on the board that the two became good friends, she said. As late as last spring Gordon visited Barkley’s home to give her an update on the park “because she was interested in what was going on out there.” Gordon pointed out that Barkley established the Red Hat Society, a social group for older women, in Annandale about five years ago. She described her as “always gracious and involved in everything and a fighter.” Shadduck and Roth told how Barkley and other Annandale Improvement Club members picked flowers from their own gardens and sold them outside the furniture store on Saturday mornings to raise money for the library and city beautification. “She was always up for anything that could improve things,” Shadduck said. “In my estimation she was a great soul. I’m glad her suffering is over.” When Roth and her husband, Bill, came to town in 1955, Barkley was the first woman she met. She was one of the first women to work outside the home and she was the first to volunteer for something, Roth said. “She was proud of her town and she certainly was proud of her family.” Barkley belonged to a bridge club that’s been meeting twice a month at members’ homes for 40 years, Roth said. Other members include her, Joan Jorgenson and Betty Freeman. “We each have to put a quarter in,” Roth laughed. Jorgenson, who knew Barkley since coming to Annandale in 1962, said she was “a great lady” who had many interests and many friends. “Whatever she believed in she went at full force,” she said. “She was a many faceted person.” Sister Aggie Soenneker of the Order of St. Francis at Clare’s Well retreat center spoke at Barkley’s funeral in St. John’s Lutheran Church on Saturday, Nov. 26. Barkley became involved in spirituality groups at Clare’s Well about 18 years ago, she said, suggesting one of Barkley’s missions in life was to help others understand that “we are all one.” Soenneker said Barkley once wrote: “Everything is connected and related to all that is. There is a basic oneness in the universe, and all events and all things are so interrelated that each one is found in the other.” In a reference to Barkley’s opposition to war, and her sign-carrying protest against the Iraq War, Soenneker said that’s why division, violence and war were so painful to her. She knew that “what we do unto others we do unto ourselves.”
