Stuart named a creek near the current town after John Henry Barrow, a preacher, journalist and politician who was born in England in 1817 and migrated to South Australia in 1853.

[citation needed] Barrow Creek was chosen as a site for an Overland Telegraph morse repeater station by John Ross in September 1871.

[citation needed] During World War II, Barrow Creek was used by the Australian Army as a staging camp for convoys of troops and supplies, which was known as No.

This problem was already recognised in the 1870s, and only 20 years after the Telegraph Station was built there is evidence of plans to shift it about 40 kilometres further north to the crossing at Taylor Creek because of better groundwater supplies.

[citation needed] During 1870 some 3,000 sheep from the Lake Hope area in South Australia were overlanded to the Northern Territory, for the men working on the line at Roper River, by Ralph and John Milner.

[citation needed] On 22 February 1874, a group of Kaytetye men attacked the Barrow Creek Telegraph Station, whose staff were relaxing outside the compound, immediately killing linesman John Frank,[4] mortally wounding Canadian telegraphist and stationmaster James Lawrence Stapleton (died on the following day)[5] and injuring several others.

In the 1920s Mounted Constable William George Murray was in charge of the local police station and also the Chief Protector of Aborigines in the area.

When asked why he had taken no prisoners he expressed the racist attitudes which prevailed at the time by telling the Darwin court "What use is a wounded black feller a hundred miles from civilisation?"

[citation needed] Barrow Creek is close to where Peter Falconio went missing, presumed murdered by Bradley John Murdoch, and Joanne Lees was abducted.

On the wall in the kitchen of the building is a cartoon of two Australian comic icons, Bluey and Curley, drawn by the artist John Gurney[10] when he passed through during World War II.

For many years the telegraph station was the home of Tom Roberts, a linesman from Charters Towers who lived in the building and repaired breakdowns of the line.