James B. Weaver House

Civil War veteran, congressman, and two-time third-party presidential candidate James Baird Weaver (1833-1912) built this historic home in 1865. Weaver, who was known as a skilled orator, served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1879 to 1881 and from 1885 to 1889. In 1880, the anti-monopolist Greenback Party nominated him as their candidate to run for president. Weaver unsuccessfully ran again for president again in 1892, this time as a member of the Populist Party. In 1975, the house was added to the National Register of Historic Places and designated a National Historic Landmark for its association with Weaver. A private residence today, it is known for its arched windows with dentillated brick hoods.

James Baird Weaver was born in Dayton, Ohio on June 12, 1833 and moved with his family to Michigan two years later. In 1842, the family moved near Keosauqua, Iowa and then to a homestead in 1843 in what would be come Davis County (at the time Iowa was an unincorporated territory; it became a state in 1846). He attended country schoolhouses where he found his talent in the English language.

Weavers' political views as an adult were shaped during his childhood. His father, Abram, was a Democrat and served on the county's first board of commissioners and was elected clerk of the district court in 1848 (Abram ran for local office on several occasions in the 1840s and 1850s). In 1849, Weaver's brother-in-law, who became postmaster in 1849, got him a job delivering mail to the adjacent Jefferson County. Two years later, Weaver left that job to study law under a local lawyer. Then in 1853, Weaver journeyed with another brother-in-law to California to search for gold. He was apparently unsuccessful and returned to Bloomfield where he resumed his law studies.

From 1855 to 1856, he attended the Cincinnati Law School. It was during that time that he became an abolitionist. He was admitted into the Iowa bar in in 1856 and got married in 1858 to Clara Vinson, with whom he would have eight children. By this time he had joined the Republican Party, which was against the expansion of slavery. In the coming years before the Civil War, Weaver became more involved with the party. He was a delegate to the party's state convention and accompanied the Iowa delegation to the 1860 Republican National Convention, where Abraham Lincoln was nominated as the party's presidential candidate.

During the war, Weaver served in the Second Iowa Infantry and eventually rose to the rank of brevet brigadier general. He saw action in several battles including Shiloh, Fort Donelson, and Corinth.

In 1866, Weaver became the district attorney for the second judicial district of Iowa and served in that position until 1870. President Johnson also appointed him as the assessor of internal revenue for the district of Iowa and served until 1873. During the next two years, Weaver ran for Congress, governor, and state senate and lost all three races. However, in 1877, Weaver joined the Greenback Party, which advocated for economic and labor rights reforms. As noted above, he was elected to Congress in 1879 and ran for president 1880, receiving just 3.3% of the vote. During the next ten years, Weaver advocated for women's voting rights, labor rights, and anti-monopolist reforms. The Greenback Party eventually dissolved by the late 1880s.

Weaver's time in Congress is also associated with the settlement of what was called the "Unassigned Lands" in what is now the state of Oklahoma. This area was in the center of the state and, at the time, surrounded by Indian reservations. Homesteaders and cattlemen argued that the area was owned by the federal government and should therefore be opened for settlement. Weaver agreed and introduced a bills in 1885 and 1886 that called for the opening of all the reservations for settlement.

Mitchell, Robert B. "Weaver, James Baird." The Biographical Dictionary of Iowa. Accessed October 22, 2021. http://uipress.lib.uiowa.edu/bdi/DetailsPage.aspx?id=399.

"Weaver, James Baird." Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. Accessed October 22, 2021. https://bioguide.congress.gov/search/bio/W000225.