James Baird Weaver was a member of the United States House of Representatives and two-time candidate for President of the U.S. Born in Ohio, he moved to Iowa as a boy when his family claimed a homestead on the frontier. Weaver became politically active as a young man and was an advocate for farmers and laborers. He married Clarrisa Vinson in 1859 and had eight children before his death in 1912.
About James B. Weaver in brief
James Baird Weaver was a member of the United States House of Representatives and two-time candidate for President of the U.S. Born in Ohio, he moved to Iowa as a boy when his family claimed a homestead on the frontier. Weaver became politically active as a young man and was an advocate for farmers and laborers. He joined and quit several political parties in the furtherance of the progressive causes in which he believed. After serving in the Union Army in the American Civil War, Weaver returned to Iowa and worked for the election of Republican candidates. In Congress, he worked for expansion of the money supply and for the opening of Indian Territory to white settlement. Weaver retired from his pursuit of elective office after serving as mayor of his home town, Colfax, Iowa. He died in Iowa in 1912 and was buried in Colfax. He was the fifth of thirteen children of Abram Weaver and Susan Imlay Weaver. He married Clarrisa Vinson in 1859 and had eight children before his death in 1912. He is buried in Bloomfield, Iowa, where he started a law firm with his brother-in-law, Hosea Horn, a Whig, the following year. In 1856, he broke with his father to join the growing coalition which opposed the expansion of slavery, which became the Republican Party. He later became the chairman of the Iowa Republican Party and gave several speeches on behalf of his new party’s candidates in 1858 and 1859.
He also served as the mayor of Colfax from 1856 to 1858, and in 1881 he was elected to the Iowa House of Reps. for a second time. He served in the Iowa State Senate from 1881 to 1883, and from 1883 to 1884 he was the state’s mayor for a third time. In 1886 he was a candidate for president for the People’s Party, which later merged with the Democrats. In 1896, 1900, and 1908 he campaigned for the candidacy of William Jennings Bryan for president. In 1912, he married Clarissa Vinson, a schoolteacher from Keosauqua, Iowa; the couple had 8 children and had been married for 30 years. Weaver was the father of eight children and a stepfather to two of his step-granddaughters, both of whom died in infancy. He had a son, James Baird Weaver, Jr., who was born in Dayton, Ohio, on June 12, 1833, and a daughter, Mary Ann Weaver, who died on June 11, 1856. His father was a farmer, also born in Ohio,. He married Weaver’s mother, who was from New Jersey, in 1824, and they moved to a farm nine miles north of Cassopolis, Michigan. The family moved again to Iowa Territory in 1842, the family moved to the Chequest Creek in Davis County. Weaver’s father built a house and farmed his new land until 1848, when the family move to Bloomfield. Two years later, Weaver interrupted his legal career to accompany a cattle drive overland to Sacramento, California.
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