Nicolas LaBarriere

Nicholas LaBarriere was born in the late 1780’s possibly in France. Family stories say he was born in France and immigrated to America as a child. This would have been during the French Revolution when many aristocrats and supporters of the old regime fled to escape the reign of terror and Madame La Guillotine.

Nicholas first shows up in the records in Baltimore in 1814 where he served during the War of 1812 in the defense of Baltimore. Shortly after his service, he married Sophia Boyer, another french emigre, at the Basilica of the Assumption in Baltimore. Nicholas and Sophia raised six children: Celestine (1815), Henrietta (1817), Francis (1818), Sophia (1820), Addele (1822), and Nicholas (1825). However, the family bible shows an Eliza (1812) indicating that Nicholas had possibly been married prior to his marriage with Sophia.

Sophia died just after Christmas in 1829 of an unknown sickness. After her death, Nicholas remained single for a number of years until marrying Margaret Lewis in 1840.

Nicholas lived in and around the Federal Hill neighborhood in close proximity to the harbor where he worked as a steamboat engineer. The engineer had the vital job of starting and stopping the ship and monitoring the boilers. Steamboating was still fairly new in the early 1820’s and there was no formal training. Engineers were often pressured to prioritize speed over safety and they pushed the engines beyond safe operating levels. As a result of this, many lives were lost in boiler explosions. Nicholas however, must have been a good engineer, enjoying a long career on the bay before his death in 1857.

The name LaBarriere is not consistently spelled in records and eventually became LaBarre.