Tazewell County Virginia USGenWeb Archives Biographies.....Bowen, Henry 1841 - 1915 ************************************************ Copyright. All rights reserved. http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://www.usgwarchives.net/va/vafiles.htm ************************************************ File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by: Joy Fisher http://www.rootsweb.com/~archreg/vols/00001.html#0000031 February 28, 2008, 7:50 pm Author: Leonard Wilson (1916) THE BOWEN FAMILY THE State of Virginia has been phenomenally rich in great families. It is strictly within the truth to say that this Republic owes more to the members of these great Virginia families than to those of any other State, and in making this statement no reflection is intended upon the services rendered by the splendid men of other States. While these great Virginia families are not, as many suppose, all of English origin, it is true that a majority of them are. Many of them, however, are of French, Welsh, Scotch and Irish descent. Our story has to do with one of these families of Welsh ancestry, the Bowens of Southwest Virginia. As all people familiar with history know, the Welsh people are of the old British stock. Ancient Britons made a gallant stand against the Romans, and, though conquered by trained armies in the greater part of the country, maintained their independence in Wales. Against Saxon, Dane and Norman the Welsh held their own, and after England was subdued by William the Norman a bloody and perpetual warfare was waged for two hundred and twenty-five years before the English power was able to dominate the rugged little country, with its gallant people and incorporate it as a part of the British domain. Even after that the Welsh did not amalgamate with the rest of the population, and to this day preserve largely the pure blood and the characteristics which, through all the centuries, have made them a strong people. The Bowen family originated in Pembrokeshire, South Wales. This is a coast county, and explains why so many of the Bowens won distinction in the English Navy. So much of the ancient history is covered up with legends, and dates are so confused, that it is quite impossible to fix a definite time as to much of this early history. Approximately, the family goes back to about the year 1050. There is a legend to the effect that the head of the family thirteen hundred years ago carried the sword of state before King Arthur at his coronation at Caerleon (Lions' Rock), in Monmouthshire. But no authentic records go back that far. About 1050, just before the Norman Conquest of England, one comes upon something like history in Wales. The various tribes had taken shape, and we know who some of their rulers were. It seems reasonably certain that this family was descended from one Griffith, who was one of the Princes of South Wales. After several generations we come upon the name "Ap Owein." To illustrate how these Welsh names run we find Robert ap John ap Thomas ap Owein, who used as his Coat of Arms that borne by Griffith Gower, Lord of Ynyssdderne, South Wales. With slight variations this is the Coat of Arms of the Pembrokeshire Bowens down to the present time. The Bowen Coat of Arms, as given in one of the books published about American Bowens, is described as: Azure a stag argent with an arrow stuck in the back and attired or. Crest: A stag standing vulned in the back with an arrow proper. This Coat of Arms comes from Swansea and Kittle Hill, Glamorganshire, Wales, to which place a branch of the family, originally founded at Pentre Evan, had moved, and from which came the American Bowens. The seat of the family appears to have been at Pentre Evan. Ap Owein, or Owen, became softened into Ab Owen, and then into Bowen. In this connection an interesting letter was written by Major Arthur Bowen, of St. Catherines, Canada, on December 17, 1859, and which will bear reproduction. He said: "There are Welsh Bowens and Irish Bowens. The latter which is descended from the Bowens who went over with "Strong-bow," the Earl of Pembroke, from Milfordhaven, in Pembrokeshire, six hundred years ago in the reign of Henry II. They all admit their Welsh origin and are proud of it, as are the Irish Lloyds, Morgans, Evans, etc. My family are Welsh of the old genuine full-blooded stock, and literal Cambrians proud of our ancestry. We have it by tradition that our ancestors were Princes of Dyfed." (Here follows the tradition above referred to about King Arthur.) The major then goes on to say: "The Bowens in South Wales are numerous, particularly in Pembrokeshire. I am a direct descendant of the pioneers of Pentre Evan ap Owen. My ancestor was the second High Sheriff of the County. These high sheriffs were first appointed in the reign of Henry VII, and since that time their names will be found in every reign filling that office; Bowen of Llwyngwair of the house of Pentre Evan, was the last. There were many generals and admirals in the family in by-gone days and in Bow generals and admirals in the family in by-gone days and in modern times. One of my first cousins was Admiral Charles Bowen, and another, Captain John Bowen. One of my brothers was in the Battle of Trafalgar. Another was at the desperate Battle of Java, where he later died on the staff of Sir Rolla Gillespie. Another brother was in the East Indian service, wounded in action and died. I am a retired major of the British service in the West Indies, East Indies and in Spain." In Burke's "Landed Gentry" appears a memorandum as to the Bowen family under the title of "Bowen of Llwyngwair," to this effect: "Llewelyn ap Owen, of Peutre Evan, County Pembroke, descended from Gwilym ap Gwrwared ap Gwilym, descended from Gwrwared, of Cemmaes, son of Cyhylyn, is frequently mentioned in Baronia de Kemeys. He was one of the free tenants of the Fee of Treevern in 13G4. He married Nest, daughter of Howell Vychan, and had five sons and three daughters. The names of four of these sons we know: Rhys, Evan, Owen and Philys." This Pentre Evan family seems to have been the main line of these Bowens. It is interesting to note that they were also ancestors of Owens and Lewises, which is something which nobody but a Welshman can figure out. The Bowen family had a very conspicuous and honorable history in Wales, and at one time, some centuries back. Sir Rees (or Rhys, the name appearing under both forms) was the greatest man of his generation in the principality. In the seventeenth century three of these Bowens emigrated to America. Griffith Bowen came to Massachusetts in 1638 and founded a prominent family there. Richard, about the same time, perhaps a little earlier, came to Rehoboth, Massachusetts, and from him is descended the Connecticut family, which is now widely spread. Moses Bowen, with his wife Rebecca Rees, came with a large company from Wales, about 1698, and settled in Guinnedd township, Chester County, Pennsylvania. It will be noted that they were strong and numerous enough to give a Welsh name to the township. Moses Bowen must have been a man of considerable means, for he acquired ten thousand acres of land in Chester County where he settled. He is said to have been a Quaker, which is not surprising, in view of the fact that the Quaker movement in England in the last half of the seventeenth century was then at its height and reached a great multitude of thinking men who seemed to have realized as fully then as we do now the horrors of war, and sought to engage men in purer, better and more peaceful living. John Bowen, sometimes spoken of as "Quaker John," a man of great physical strength, son of Moses and Rebecca Rees Bowen, was a man of considerable wealth for his time. He married Lilly McIlhany, a beautiful Scotch-Irish girl of seventeen, who had come with her mother and stepfather to Pennsylvania. She was a daughter of Henry and Jane McIlhany. Her father died in her infancy, leaving two children, Lilly and Henry. The mother married secondly, a Mr. Hunter, and with her second husband and two children came to Pennsylvania. Mrs. Hunter and her daughter were both expert flax spinners, and were said to have been the first Scotch-Irish women to bring the small flax-wheel to Pennsylvania. John Bowen migrated to Augusta County, Virginia, about 1730, at that time an extreme frontier settlement. John Bowen and his wife, Lilly McIlhany, were the parents of twelve children: Moses, John, Jane, Nancy, Rebecca, Henry, Arthur, Robert, Mary, Charles, William and Rees. Moses died of small-pox while serving in the Virginia Colonial Army, John married Rachel Mathew; Jane married Cunningham, who died, and she afterward married Fring; Nancy married Archie Buchanan; Rebecca married Whitley; Henry married Anne Cunningham; Arthur married Mary McMurray; Robert married Mary Gillespie; Mary married Poston; Charles married Nancy Gillespie; and Rees married Levisa Smith. Captain William Bowen married Mary Henley Russell, daughter of General William Russell by his first wife, Tabitha Adams, his second wife being the widow of General William Campbell, the hero of King's Mountain, and before her marriage was Elizabeth Henry, sister of Patrick Henry. Colonel John H. Bowen, son of Captain William Bowen, was a noted lawyer and a representative from Tennessee in the Thirteenth Congress. Catherine Bowen, daughter of Captain William Bowen, married David Campbell, brother of Governor Campbell of Virginia, and her son, William Bowen Campbell, was the sixteenth Governor of Tennessee, serving from 1851 to 1853, held other honorable positions and was one of the great men of Tennessee in his generation. Moses Bowen and his son John are said to have been Quakers, but never did the peaceable Friends breed a stronger lot of fighting men than these two sturdy Quakers. Brief space is here given to the records of some of these. When the Revolutionary War broke upon the country, the Bowens were ardent patriots to a man. One of the sons of John, Rees Bowen, born about 1742, after arriving at manhood, settled in what is now Rockbridge County, Virginia, but in 1772 moved further up country and settled at Maiden Spring, Tazewell County. The lands which he then acquired have now been in the family for five generations. In 1774 he took part in the battle of Point Pleasant, on the Ohio River, waged between the Virginians under General Andrew Lewis and the Indians under their chief, Cornstalk. This was what is known as Dunmore's War. Evidently he became a Revolutionary soldier, for he was in an expedition which went to the release of the Kentucky stations in 1778. The summer and fall of 1780 was the darkest period of the Revolutionary cause in the Southern States. Cornwallis had overrun the Carolinas and everywhere defeated the defenders, and only irregular bands were keeping up the struggle. Colonel Ferguson, one of the most efficient of the British officers, a Scotchman of approved valor, and noted for his ability in partisan warfare, was dispatched to the western section of North Carolina by his chief for the purpose of rallying the Tories in that section, and also of striking terror to their opponents. That section had not before been invaded, and the mountaineers began to buzz like a nest of angry hornets. From the upper regions of North Carolina, from extreme western North Carolina, from the Watauga, from the Holston and from the Clinch these deadly marksmen gathered under their colonels and rallied to meet the British. Down from southwestern Virginia came William Campbell at the head of his four hundred Virginians. Among these was a company commanded by William Bowen, his brother Rees being lieutenant. When the colonels had gathered together with their cohorts Ferguson became alarmed and retreated, finally making a stand on King's Mountain. Draper's "History of King's Mountain and Its Heroes" tells the story in great detail—a story worth telling —for it was the turning point of the struggle in the Southern Colonies. When the battle impended Captain William Bowen was ill of a fever. The command of his company devolved upon his brother Rees. Considering the small number of men engaged, not over two thousand men, all told in both of the little armies, the struggle was a furious one, the American riflemen charging up the mountain with great valor and the British meeting them with equal courage. Rees Bowen leading his company was observed to be making hazardous and unnecessary exposure of his person. Some friend remonstrated. "Why, Bowen, do you not take a tree? Why rashly present yourself to the deliberate aim of the Provincial and Tory riflemen concealed behind every rock and bush before you? Death will inevitably follow if you persist." "Take to a tree!" he indignantly replied. "No, never shall it be said that I sought safety by hiding my person or dodging from Briton or Tory who opposed me in the field." He had scarcely concluded his brief utterance when a rifle-ball struck him in the breast, and he fell instantly and expired. The record of the man who fought at King's Mountain shows that the Bowens started there what appears to have become a habit with them. When there was any fighting to be done for their country, they all went. For among the King's Mountain men appeared William Bowen, captain; Arthur Bowen, captain; Rees Bowen, lieutenant; Henry Bowen, private; Robert Bowen, private, all live being brothers and sons of John Bowen. Lieutenant Rees Bowen married Levisa Smith. Their children were Colonel Henry Bowen, Captain Bees Bowen, Levisa, Nancy, Peggy, Rebecca and Lilly. Of these children, Rees married his cousin Rebecca Bowen, but left no children; Nancy married Major John Ward, who left a large family; Peggy married Thomas Gillespie, and she also left a numerous family; Rebecca married a Mr. Duff, and of that family we have no record; Lilly married Mr. Hildreth, and went to Kentucky where many of her descendants now live, and Levisa married William Thompson, many of their descendants still residing in Tazewell County. Colonel Henry Bowen married Ella Tate, and their children were, General Rees T. Bowen, Colonel Henry S. Bowen, Jane, Louisa and Ellen Bowen. Colonel Henry Bowen, son of Lieutenant Rees, was a man of note in his section during his life, served his people in both houses of the General Assembly, was an officer in the War of 1812 and was a man of high standing and solid ability who enjoyed the esteem and confidence of his people. Louisa Bowen, daughter of Colonel Henry and Ellen Tate Bowen, married Dr. John W. Johnston, a brother of the famous General Joseph E. Johnston, of the Confederate Army. Dr. John W. Johnston was a very skillful physician, who died young. His son, John W., Jr., was educated at Abington Academy, South Carolina College and the University of Virginia. He became a lawyer and practiced his profession in Tazewell County, was Commonwealth's Attorney in 1842, a member of the Virginia Senate in 1847 and 1S48, President of the North-Western Bank of Jeffersonville from 1850 to 1850, and Judge of the Tenth Judicial Circuit from 1867 to 1869, when he was elected to the United States Senate from Virginia for the term ending in 1871. He was twice re-elected, making his service continuous from January 26, 1870, to March 3, 1883. He was a frequent writer on legal and political topics, and contributed several historical articles to the magazines. He was married in Tazewell County, Virginia, October 12, 1841, to Nicketti Floyd, daughter of Governor John Floyd, of Virginia, and one account says they had six sons and six daughters. A probably more reliable account gives them five children, as follows: Dr. George Ben Johnston, ex-President of the American Surgical Association; Joseph E., Lavalette, who married a McMullin; Sally Johnston, who married Captain Henry Lee, brother of General Fitzhugh Lee, and Charlie Johnston. Senator Johnston died February 27, 1889. General Rees T. Bowen was married twice; first to Louisa Peery, and afterward to Lucy Gravatt. Of his marriage with Louisa Peery there were born the following children: Ellen S., Major Thomas P., Jane, Captain Henry, Rees T., Edward, Hattie, John and Lou Bowen. From the second marriage was born a daughter, now Mrs. George Turner, of Merchantsville, Pennsylvania. General Rees T. Bowen was born at Maiden Spring, Tazewell County, January 10, 1809. He received an academic education at home and at the Abingdon Academy. His occupation through life was that of a farmer and grazier. His marriage with Maria Louisa Peery took place on June 13, 1835. He represented Tazewell in the Legislature of Virginia from 1800 to 1865, and served as brigadier-general of the Virginia militia by appointment of Governor Wise. No man of his day was more highly esteemed in the section than General Rees Bowen. When the great Civil War burst upon the country his sons entered the Confederate Army to a man. After the war there was a period of some years full of political turmoil in the Southern States. In the emergency the people naturally turned to their most trusted men. General Bowen was elected to the Forty-third Congress as a conservative, serving from December 1, 1873, to the termination of that Congress in 1875, and as a measure of the esteem in which he was held by his people, he defeated his opponent, R. W. Hughes, by a vote of 10,352 against Hughes' vote of 5304. He died August 29, 1879. While in Congress his kinsman, Senator Johnston, was in the Upper House. Captain Henry Bowen, son of General Rees T. Bowen, was born at Maiden Spring, Tazewell County, Virginia, December 20, 1841. He received a liberal education, at Emory and Henry College, served through the four years of the Civil War, was a captain of cavalry, resumed his occupation as a farmer and grazier after the war, served two terms in the Virginia Legislature, and in 1882 was elected to Congress as a readjuster and re-elected to the Fiftieth Congress as a Republican, receiving 13,497 votes against 9927 for R. R. Henry, Democrat. Captain Henry Bowen was one of the best loved men who ever lived in that section of Virginia, and his story is so well worth telling that we give in full here an appreciation of him written after his death by an intimate friend, who was much better qualified to write it than any biographer, however capable: A BOWEN OF THE BOWENS "Our kindly mother earth so bountiful in her gifts of the season's fruits, at times exacts unusual tribute from her children, and in this year, so fateful of their destines, she is taking back to her bosom the best of many lands, and let us hope that she holds them as hostage for the future peace of the nations. "The fearful necrology of this year of our Lord embraces not only the names of soldiers of many lands and from all the Continents, but from our own are being gathered the soldiers of another great war, who, surviving its battlefields, are obeying the fiat of a law older and more inexorable than the law of battle —the traditional statute of the three score years and ten. "Of one of these we write with a full heart, Captain Henry Bowen, who died full of years and of honors, at his ancestral home at Maiden Spring, on April 29, 1915. "Though admirable in all his relations and responsibilities, by reason of racial tendencies inherent in the Bowens, and illustrated in all his country's wars, from King's Mountain to Appomattox, he was proud of his record as a soldier of the Confederacy (though one of the most unassuming of men), and he maintained that a soldier who had clone his full duty during the four terrible years of our great Civil War could gain no higher distinction, could achieve no greater renown. "The fitness to serve or to command with him was a heritage, for in all our wars from the Revolution, where the first (American) Rees Bowen lost his life, in the War of 1812, in the war with Mexico, in 1846, and then in 1861-5, all the Bowens went into service save the aged head of the family, General Rees Tate Bowen, who was serving his State in the Legislature in Richmond throughout the war, and who served in Congress, 1873-5. "Thus, we have the roster. Colonel Henry Smith Bowen, a brother of General Bowen, who commanded the 22d Virginia Cavalry; Major Thomas P. Bowen, of the 8th Virginia Cavalry; Captain Henry Bowen (the subject of this sketch), Rees T. Bowen (now the head of the family), and later on William Edward Bowen, the youngest brother, the cadet of the family. "Of the twenty years of his boyhood there is little to say, but that his surroundings must have contributed to the development of a character singularly charming, and fitted him for the easy assumption of any duty or responsibility to which the unfolding reel of life might call him; the manorial homestead, Maiden Spring, with its boundless hospitality, overlooking a wide-reaching landscape, probably the most beautiful in Virginia, miles of meadows, fields and woodland. These were his teachers. "Here he was taught no narrow creed, for all that the hills taught of freedom, all that mountains taught of stability, and all that the valleys whispered of happiness, conspired in the making of the soldier, the statesman and the citizen whose loss we deplore. "A memory picture of Bowen's Cove in 1861 shows two stately mansions on a great plateau, with wide stretching savannas between, sloping to the south where a section of the mountain had been removed by some prehistoric giant to make the landscape perfect, and here lived two brothers, typical descendants of a strong-armed race. General Rees Tate Bowen and Colonel Henry Smith Bowen, the former with four stalwart sons and three lovely daughters around him, and the latter, being childless, could only offer himself to his country, and served it faithfully as Colonel of the 22d Virginia Cavalry. "After a brief service early in the war as sergeant-major of the 45th Virginia Regiment, Henry Bowen was invalided and elected to the command of Company H of the 8th Virginia Cavalry, and with a strong preference for this branch of the service, and association with the members of his gallant troop, he sought neither transfer nor promotion. His regiment, one of the best in the army, saw its initial service in what is now West Virginia, under several commanders—Payne, Floyd, the great Robert E. Lee (his first command), and others. Here, in what is called the Northwest Campaign, the regiment received its baptism, at Carnifax Ferry, McCoy Bridge, Kanawha Falls, etc., until ordered to report to General W. E. Jones for service in Tennessee. "Beginning at Bristol, Jones' little army drove the Federals to the gates of Knoxville, with many small engagements, surprises and running fights; but the enemy being strongly reinforced, Jones' command slowly retreated through Cumberland Gap, and was later incorporated with the forces in the Valley of Virginia, under Early, Rosser, Fitzhugh Lee and others. Here, after fierce fighting through what is known as the Winchester Campaign, Captain Bowen was surrounded and taken prisoner. His capture at Lacy's Spring, on December 21, 1864, terminated his career as a soldier in the field. He was imprisoned at Fort Delaware, where he remained until June, 1865, when he was released from prison and returned to his old home to resume the pursuits of peace, and to bear his part in the rehabilitation of the Southland from the ravages of a long and cruel war. "A good soldier, as a rule, makes a good citizen, and Captain Bowen, for the half century that his life was spared to him and his friends, assumed without ostentation and performed with conspicuous faithfulness every obligation laid upon him in that capacity. "As a member of the Legislature of the State in the crucial years of reconstruction, he took a prominent and creditable part in the readjustment of the State debt, and in other issues of a time memorable in our history. "It was during his last session in Richmond that the great Capitol disaster occurred, in which sixty-one men were killed and over two hundred injured, but by reason of his strength he escaped in company with his comrade in arms and colleague in the Legislature, John W. Daniel. "This incident recalls a similar one that happened to Colonel Henry Bowen, Captain Bowen's grandfather, who was an officer in the War of 1812, a delegate, almost the first, from the new County of Tazewell, in the Legislature of Virginia, who happened to be present at the burning of the Richmond Theatre, and he being an athlete, like most members of his family, made his way to safety over the heads of the frantic and packed crowd in the lobby. (Here it may be well to say that Captain Bowen, a stalwart and an athlete, though often dismounted in battle, was able to remount himself and rejoin his command, except in his last fight at Lacy's Spring, when surrounded by Sheridan's Cavalry, and was wounded only once during his service, and that slightly at the Battle of Winchester.) "His auspicious marriage occurred during his term as delegate to the General Assembly, being celebrated December 4, 1871, uniting two prominent. County families, and two hearts that beat in unison for nearly half a century. His bride was Louisa, a daughter of the late William M. Gillespie, a sister of ex-Senator •Joseph S. Gillespie, of the late Albert P. Gillespie, a distinguished member of the Constitutional Convention, and of the late David Gillespie. "And of this lovely young bride of the seventies, what can be said save what has been written by her beautiful life and into the lives of her circle. After a ministration of love and tenderness of forty-four years, after the husband of her youth had obeyed the last call, her own silver cord was loosened; side by side they sleep and their children rise up and call them blessed. United in life, in death, they are undivided. Her death occurred May 21, 1915. "A tribute like this, largely a labor of love, can hardly be ornate or consecutive, and may embrace incidents more or less disconnected in the life of the subject, but Captain Bowen's marriage preceded nearly a decade of busy usefulness as a farmer and grazier, with the constantly recurring duties of citizenship until, in 1883, he was elected to Congress from the Ninth District, largely by the people who approved his course in the Legislature on the readjustment of the State debt, and by friends who supported him for personal reasons, as was the case subsequently when, in 1887, he was again elected as a member of the Fiftieth Congress as a Republican and served his constituents faithfully and ably. "In an era given over to sectional and political fury, he was calm, for the storm passed by him; in an epoch of corruption, contention and political misfeasance, he was serene, for the storm passed "beneath" him. "In the years that followed, he found surcease from the turmoil of politics in the management of a great estate, the education of his children and the even tenor of his duties as a citizen. The children whom the Lord had given him, and who are yet unmentioned, are, Margaret E., James Walker, William Bees, Henry A. and Joseph C. Bowen. One brother survives him, Rees T. Bowen, and one sister, Mrs. Louisa Bowen Kroll. "The recurrence of family names with the distinctive forename, "Rees," brought down from Wales, has been continuous—a brother, now the head of the family, and two nephews, Captain Rees Bowen, of the Norfolk and Western, and Rees T. Bowen, Jr.. bear it to-day. Henry, another name recurring in every family, is borne by a son, Henry A., and a nephew, Henry Smith Bowen, of Wittens Mills. "(Remembering that the great Bowen estate was an English grant, it is presumed that the original grantee had performed some signal service to the crown of which this Colonial grant was a recognition, and that the "strong-arm" Bees Boweu, who took up the grant, had earned the gratitude of the King against whom he fought at King's Mountain, in defense of the home he had granted him.) "And now, realizing that this tribute in memoriam should be in the nature of a consensus, we will here interpolate an appreciation wired by the Governor of the State to Mrs. Bowen, and let it speak for Captain Bowen's fellow-citizens in Virginia: "The loss is not yours alone. The State has lost a son in whose life and character were exemplified in a high degree the qualities of honor, courage and patriotism, which for five generations characterized and distinguished the name he bore. A gallant soldier, an upright citizen, honorable in all relations, he worthily typified the race of men whose sword drove out the Indian and the alien, and whose good right arm carved from the wilderness the paradise of the mountains. Please know that my sympathy goes out to you and yours in this dark hour of affliction. "Henry C. Stuart." "And one who knew him as a boy, who admired him as a soldier, who has his unbroken friendship in mature manhood, and enfeebled age, would give tongue to the intimate qualities which made him so charming as a friend and neighbor—to the modesty that renders true merit conspicuous—to the tenderness that gloves the hand of strength, to the courage that robs life of the bitterness of its vicissitudes, and faces the last terror, no matter how slow and insidious its approach, with a smile. "Now there thou liest, Sir Launcelot, that wert never matched at mortal knight's hands "Thou wert the gentlest Knight that ever sate in hall among ladies "The tenderest Knight that ever marshalled in tilt or tourney,— "And the sternest Knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in rest." The children of Captain Henry Bowen and Louisa M. Gillespie are: Margaret Ellen Bowen, a graduate of Kirksville School of Osteopathy, who is a doctor of osteopathy, and unmarried; James Walker, a graduate of Washington and Lee University, a farmer and grazier, and unmarried; William Rees Bowen, a student of Hampden Sidney College. He also is a farmer and grazier, and married to Fannie J. Barns, of Tazewell County; Henry Albert Bowen, the fourth child, graduated at Richmond College, practices law at Tazewell, married his cousin, Mary Ellen Bowen; the fifth child, Lou Ollie Bowen, died young; the sixth child, Joseph Clinton Bowen, was a student of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute, is a farmer and grazier, and married Courtney Cox, of Farmville, Virginia. Of these, James Walker, William Rees, and Joseph Clinton live at Maiden Spring, on lands which are part of the old Bowen grant. The only surviving sister of Major T. P. Bowen, of Captain Henry Bowen, and of Rees Tate Bowen (3), is Louisa Bowen Kroll, wife of J. P. Kroll, a retired business man, living at Tazewell. Major Thomas Peery Bowen, a gallant soldier, who, like his younger brother, served continuously in the Eighth Virginia Cavalry, in the last days of the war around Petersburg, became first ranking officer of his own regiment until the fall of General Payne, and then was promoted by succession to the command of that brigade. But in the dying days of the Confederacy, there were no official records of promotion, and we give as above the last recorded rank as major, by which title he was known and most generally and intimately indicated in the nearly half century of his useful and busy life, till his death in 1911. In June, 1866, he was happily married to Miss Gussie Stuart, of Greenbrier, who was a daughter of Mr. W. B. Stuart, himself a descendant of the Revolution, and father also of Mrs. Edmund Sehon, of Point Pleasant, and of Judge J. H. Stuart, now of Roanoke. This estimable and cultured lady, living as these memoirs are published, at Tazewell, where Major Bowen died in 1911, has surviving children as follows: Reese Tate Bowen (6), for years a trusted official of the Norfolk and Western Railway Company; Mrs. Jennie O'Brien, the wife of W. G. O'Brien, editor of the Tazewell "Republican," and living with her mother at Tazewell; and Miss Ellen Stuart Bowen, who has devoted her life to teaching and to her mother; and Stuart Bowen, who died at Roanoke, at the age of thirty-one. (Lucy, the first daughter, died in infancy.) Rees Tate Bowen, a fine soldier and citizen, who on the death of his elder brother became the head of the family, now living at his town house in Tazewell; of him the best thing, perhaps, to be said is that he is a Bowen of the Bowens, possessing all the racial traits—amiable in private life, intensely patriotic, strong in action, and wise in counsel. His life since the great civil war has been spent on his ancestral estate at Maiden Spring, to which home he brought as his bride and helpmate, in 1872, Mary Crockett, of Crockett's Cove, Wythe County. This lovely lady has impressed her rare qualities of mind, heart and feature on eight living children, who console her for the loss of a lovely little daughter in infancy. Of these children, Sallie is the wife of Samuel J. Thompson, whose home is on the great Bowen estate at Maiden Spring; (2) Henry Smith Bowen, now a great landed proprietor, farmer and grazier, and happily married to May, a daughter of the late Honorable W. G. Mustard, and living at Wittens Mills, in Tazewell County; Thompson Crockett Bowen, a prominent lawyer at Tazewell, and married to J. Nannie, a daughter of J. Meek Hoge, of Burkes Garden, also living at Tazewell; Rees Tate Bowen (5), living at the home of his father, at Maiden Spring, and married to Mary, a daughter of George Ward. of Wards Cove; Dr. Samuel Cecil Bowen, formerly associated with his kinsman, Dr. George Ben Johnston, in the practice of medicine, and now a specialist in diseases of the eye, ear, nose and throat, and established in Richmond; Jennie, who in 1905 was married to the Honorable J. Powell Royall, a lawyer and State Senator, whose splendid home is also at Tazewell; Miss Rachel Alverta, who is yet with her parents; and Mary Ellen, the wife of Henry Albert Bowen, a lawyer and business man of Tazewell. Additional Comments: Extracted from: MAKERS OF AMERICA BIOGRAPHIES OF LEADING MEN OF THOUGHT AND ACTION THE MEN WHO CONSTITUTE THE BONE AND SINEW OF AMERICAN PROSPERITY AND LIFE VOLUME II By LEONARD WILSON, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF ASSISTED BY PROMINENT HISTORICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL WRITERS Illustrated with many full page engravings B. F. JOHNSON, INC. CITY OF WASHINGTON, U. S. A. 1916 Copyright, 1916 by B. F. Johnson, Inc. Photo: http://www.usgwarchives.net/va/tazewell/photos/bios/bowen82gbs.jpg File at: http://files.usgwarchives.net/va/tazewell/bios/bowen82gbs.txt This file has been created by a form at http://www.genrecords.org/vafiles/ File size: 34.8 Kb