Coventry Roots: Barclay

In this series on the villages of Coventry we will be exploring the village called Barclay, now known as Tiogue.  This village was located just to the west of Washington Village.  The exact date of founding is not known but it has its roots in the early nineteenth century.

Barclay was named for the eighteenth century Scottish Quaker Preacher and Essayist, Robert Barclay.  The village was given the name by the Anthony Family who we learned about in the .  The village was originally named Pleasant Vale and there was a cotton manufacturing company operated by Fones Potter located there. 

Fones Potter was born in 1759, served as a soldier in the American Revolution and died in 1833.  Before his death he sold his cotton mill and water rights in the reservoir to Jabez Anthony and Perez Peck.  Anthony and Peck established the Rope Walk, an enclosed building used to manufacture anchor rope, twine, and cotton banding, on the banks of a stream that flows out of the Tiogue Reservoir.   The structure had to be at least one thousand feet long in order to lay out the raw material needed to twist rope.  The rope walk that stood on this site was a steam powered mill and was 1,080 feet long.

Rope walks were dangerous places to work because of the combustibility of the material used to manufacture rope.  As time went along Anthony was able to buy out Peck and run the rope walk with the help of his son, William H. Anthony.  With the death of his father in 1842, William became the owner and in 1860  Edwin L. Anthony, William's son, worked in the rope walk.. 

By the late nineteenth century the manufacturing of rope had ceased on this site.  In the early twentieth century the area around Lake Tiogue began to be developed into a summer colony.  This development has continued to present day.  The village of Barclay has been erased from the map by this growth. The only two buildings that still exist from this time are the William H. Anthony House located on Holmes Road and the Samuel Tarbox House located on Arnold Road.  The property where the Rope Walk once stood is bordered by Holmes Road, Lydia Road, York Drive, and Arnold Road.