- JAMES E. BOWEN is a name prominent in the records of the
town of Sylvester, Green county,
- where he has lived an honorable and upright life for many
years.
- Mr. BOWEN is a son of Davis and Rachel J. (BROWN) BOWEN,
natives of Virginia, the former
- of whom was born about 1795, and his wife in 1792. They came
to Wisconsin in 1838 when it was teeming with Indians and wild
beasts, and settled on section 27, town of Sylvester. Here they
lived and died, his death occurring in 1867; his widow survived
until 1876. They were married about 1820, and were the parents
of three children: James E., whose name introduces this article;
Robert C., who died in Wisconsin; and Annie M., who married Reuben
G. FLEEK, of Brodhead, and is now deceased. Davis BOWEN was a
son of Samuel BOWEN, a captain in the militia of the colony of
Virginia. He had a reputation as a born Indian fighter, and participated
in all the combats with the savages in the Upper Ohio Valley
during the Revolution. In history he is recorded as one of the
very first settlers to cross the mountains and penetrate into
West Virginia. The ancestors of Capt. BOWEN were of Welsh nativity.
- James Edgar BOWEN was born Sept. 25, 1825, in West Virginia,
near the mouth of the Cheat
- river, near the Pennsylvania line. He came to Green county
during his thirteenth year, and spent his older boyhood among
the scenes and hardships of pioneer life. In 1859 he married
Miss Martha Ann CLARK, a daughter of Joseph CLARK, whose name
figures in the pioneer records of this state. Two of their children
lived to maturity; Davis, who was born in 1864, and resides in
Montana; and Susan, born in 1868, who married James Sherman SHAFER,
of the town of Sylvester, and is the mother of two children,
Vivian Jeannette and Martha Vara. Mr. SHAFER and his family live
near Desmet, South Dakota.
- Mr. BOWEN first lived on the farm in Green county at a time
when very little opportunity was
- given the average youth for schooling. In all he attended
school less than a year, and his education, which is by no means
meager, has been acquired very largely by home study and contact
with the world. He has in years past been an extensive traveler.
In 1851, in company with some friends, he drove an ox-team overland
to Oregon and California. In 1854 he returned home, by way of
Panama and the steamer route to New Orleans, and thence home
via the Mississippi river. Mr. BOWEN has been in some thirty-five
States of the Union, as well as Mexico and South America. He
is a man of retentive memory and wide reading, true and honest
in his convictions, and frank and outspoken in their expression.
Politically he is a stanch Democrat, and his father before him
was a strong and earnest supporter of Andrew Jackson. Our subject
cast his last vote for William J. Bryan in 1900. He was a States
Rights Democrat during the Civil war.
- Mr. BOWEN comes of a family of pioneer settlers in every
generation from his great-grandfather
- to his own son, who early moved to Montana.
-
- Taken from "Commemorative Biographical Record of
the Counties of Rock, Green, Grant, Iowa and Lafayette Wisconsin,"
(c)1901 Union Publishing; p. 932.
-
- Courtesy of Carol.
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