BARKER, Neal Dow (1857-1925)., of Winnipeg, Man. first advertised in the Winnipeg Times of 28 March 1883, 3, as an 'Architect and Heating and Ventilating Engineer, late of Manchester, England'. He was born at Cheethamhill, a borough of Manchester, in April 1857 and arrived in Manitoba in 1880. In 1882 both he and another Manchester native Henry F. Slater collaborated on a submission in the important competition for the new Winnipeg City Hall (G. Brooks, Plain Facts about the New City Hall, 1884, 10, list of competitors). Their drawings were passed over by the Jury, and Barber, Bowes & Barber were declared as the winners.
In June of 1884 Barker was commissioned to prepare plans for the Manitoba Medical College, McDermot Street at Kate Street, WINNIPEG, MAN., but when unexpectedly high estimates were received he was unjustly dismissed from the job by a medical faculty board member '......who thought he could get a better building put up for less money'. Barker's plans were then handed to an unscrupulous architect Victor Stewart, who retraced the drawings and presented a 'new' scheme which bore a distinct resemblance to the earlier proposal. Barker took his case to the public forum of the local newspapers; Stewart hotly denied any professional misconduct on his part, and the administrators of the college finally admitted complicity in the affair because it was '...solely due to our being ignorant medical men' (Winnipeg Daily Times, 30 July 1884, 8; 31 July 1884, 4; 1 August 1884, 4). The College was completed in January 1885 and new wing was later added in 1895 (Illustrated Souvenir of Winnipeg, 1902, 147, illus.). Barker moved to Pasadena, Calif. after 1900 where he continued to practise in Altadena for nearly 2 decades.. He died in an auto collision near Bakersfield, Kern County, California on 28 November 1925 (obituary Pasadena Evening Post, 30 Nov. 1925, 1; obit. Los Angeles Times, 2 Dec. 1925, Section Two, p. 7, and 3 Dec. 1925, 25; obit. Los Angeles Evening Express, 3 Dec. 1925, 15)