James Henry Gower was an early pioneer of Iowa City, Iowa, who served as a delegate to Iowa’s first constitutional convention in 1844. The seven children born to Gower and his wife, Borredell Greenwood Gower were five sons James Otis A.B., John Holmes, Robert Horace, Francis Greenwood, and Charles Henry A.M., and two daughters Mary Cornelia and Phoebe Frances.1 As a leading Iowa City businessman and entrepreneur, James Henry Gower operated the Gower’s Land Agency in partnership with his sons. During the Civil War, his son, James Otis, served in the 1st Iowa Cavalry, which was engaged in battles in Missouri and Arkansas, including the Battle of Prairie Grove, Arkansas, on December 7, 1862. There is a John Henry Gower listed on the U.S., Civil War Draft Registrations Records, 1863-1865, but there is no record of service for him.

James Otis Gower was commissioned as an officer in Company F, 1st Iowa Cavalry Regiment in August 1861.2 This famous regiment was organized June 5, 1861, and ordered into quarters at Benton Barracks near St. Louis, Missouri, in the middle of October in the same year.

During the entire winter of 1861, eight companies of the 1st Iowa Cavalry were engaged in patrolling western Missouri. Ever on the alert, their engagements and skirmishes were numerous. In December, they took part in an important expedition to Van Buren, Arkansas, resulting in the defeat of some Confederates and the capture of immense military stores.3

James Otis Gower survived the war and mustered out of service in August 1863, but died two years later in September 1865.4

In 1874, James Henry Gower extended his business ventures to Lawrence, Kansas, where electrical power to businesses was made possible that year by completion of a dam across the Kansas River. He and other investors constructed a flour mill, called the Douglas County Mills, contracting with the Lawrence Land and Water Company for the mill’s water power. The Gower family moved from Iowa City, Iowa, to Lawrence in 1877, as did Gower’s daughter, Mary, and her husband Justin DeWitt Bowersock. Within days of their arrival, part of the Kansas River dam washed out, forcing the Lawrence Land and Water Company into bankruptcy.5 Gower purchased the company which was sold by order of the Court. Following James Henry Gower’s death in 1879, his son-in-law, Bowersock, oversaw the company and the dam’s repair.6 Gower, his wife, Borredell, and several of their sons are buried at Oakland Cemetery in Iowa City, in Johnson County, Iowa.

The papers contain two Civil War letters from Gower’s son James Otis Gower of the 1st Iowa Cavalry–one in which he describes the Battle of Prairie Grove, Arkansas, and a copy of Confederate general, Thomas Carmichael Hindman’s, address to his soldiers prior to the battle of Prairie Grove. The address was discovered during the policing of the battlefield by Federal troops and was widely reprinted in Midwestern newspapers as a “masterpiece of scoundrelism.”7

Contributed by the Wilson’s Creek National Battlefield

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1. 1860 U.S. Federal Census; Census Place: Iowa City, Johnson, Iowa; Roll: M653_327; Page: 784; Image: 300; Family History Library Film: 803327.
2. “James Otis Gower”, UNION IOWA VOLUNTEERS, 1st Regiment, Iowa Cavalry, National Parks Service Civil War Soldiers and Sailors, http://www.itd.nps.gov/cwss/soldiers.cfm
3. Historical Data Systems, comp. American Civil War Regiments [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc., 1999.
4. Iowa Cemetery Records [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc., 2000. Original data: Works Project Administration. Graves Registration Project. Washington, D.C.: n.p., n.d.
5. William Elsey Connelley, A Standard History of Kansas and Kansans, Volume Five (Chicago: Lewis Publishing Company, 1918), 2409.
6. Bowerstock Mills and Power Company, http://kansastravel.org/lawrence/bowersockmill.html
7. William L. Shea, Fields of Blood: The Prairie Grove Campaign (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 264.