Barrick W. Groom, 73, onetime rancher and civic leader with homes in Upperville, Tucson, Ariz., and London, died suddenly in the Winchester Medical Center Jan. 5, 2003 of an aneurysm.

He was stricken at Mill Street House, his home in Upperville, and rushed to Winchester as he was preparing to fly to his winter home in Tucson.

He lived in Washington, D.C. for a number of years after arriving there in 1975 to accept an appointment in the Nixon administration. Instead of government service, he became a volunteer at the Smithsonian Institution, helping to raise funds for the 1976 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, and later establishing the Barrick W. Groom Endowment to promote cultural diplomacy through international, interdisciplinary studies.

A relative of Thomas Jefferson through the Randolph family, Groom was keenly interested in biography as a means of understanding history.

He helped to organize the Smithsonian's 1977 symposium, "Kin and Communities: Families in America," as well as the earlier Bicentennial conference, "The United States in the World."

He was devoted to his family. His children and grandchildren bear family names.

He was born in New York City, Nov. 4, 1929 to William Wilbur Groom and Louise Tullis Barrick.

He was educated at Pembroke Country Day School in Kansas City, the Culver Military Academy in Culver, Ind. and Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H, graduating in 1948.

His training for the Counter-Intelligence Corps during the Korean War was received at Fort Holabird in Baltimore.

An Anglophile, Groom was a founding member and past president of the Tucson chapter of the English-Speaking Union, a member of the board of the British Institute of America, and a connoisseur of British theatre whose plays he enjoyed during his annual periods of residence in London.

In Upperville, he followed the neo-British sport of equestrian competition and in Tucson was an enthusiast of polo.

Groom's various civic duties include patronage of the arts in Tucson, service on the board of the Catalina Council of the Boys Scouts of America, promoting support for the Smithsonian's Front Royal facility and for medical research to combat juvenile diabetes.

As a businessman, he was a registered representative of the New York Stock Exchange, investment advisor to H.O. Peet and Co. of Kansas City, co-owner of the U Circle Cattle Co. in Oracle, Ariz., and a partner in the Catalina Foothills Estates in Tucson.

He used his ties to the business community to identify financial support for the Smithsonian in addition to his own contributions to such philanthropies as The Salvation Army.

Survivors include his former wife, Patricia Murphey Groom; three children, Louisa Tullis Groom, Barrick Warfield Groom and Randolph Whitney Groom; one granddaughter, Jessica Nicole Groom; and one grandson, Emerson Barrick Groom, all of Tucson.

Funeral services were conducted on Jan. 11 in the Trinity Church in Upperville. Interment followed in the church's cemetery.

Groom served on the vestry of that parish.