Dr. Cowell was born in Bradford county, Pennsylvania, on April 27, 1843. He was educated in the public schools of that county, and in 1862, when he was nineteen years old, he enlisted in defense of the Union in the One Hundred and Forty-first Pennsylvania Infantry. In that command he served eighteen months. At the battle of Chancellorsville he received five wounds and, being incapacitated for further service, returned home. In 1865 he moved to Grundy county, Illinois, and began to read medicine at Minooka in that county, afterward entering the Hahnemann Medical College in Chicago, where he was graduated in 1871. He then located at Elwood, Illinois, where he carried on a successful practice until 1896. In that year he came to Colorado and purchased the fruit farm of fifteen acres on which his family now lives. It is one mile and a half north of Grand Junction, and one of the best and most productive in fruit in this part of the county. The Doctor became active in promoting the best interests of the valley, being enthusiastic over its resources and eager for their rapid and full development. Recently his health failed and he is now (1904) under treatment in a hospital. For a number of years he served on the board of pension examiners in this county, and also in Illinois, and while a resident of Illinois was a member of the city council of the town in which he lived, and president of the temperance society there. In politics he is a stanch and active Republican, zealous in the service of his party as he is in everything else in which he takes an interest. In fraternal relations he belongs to the order of Elks and the Grand Army of the Republic. He was married on November 8, 1868, to Miss Catherine M. Ferryman, a native of Guernsey county, Ohio, by whom he has one daughter, Nellie G., who is living at home, and one son, Forrest, who was killed in a railroad wreck January 8, 1902, near Ogden, Utah. Her mother died in 1887, and in 1888 the Doctor contracted a second marriage, being united on this occasion with Mrs. Josie L. (Linebarger) Brown, a native of Will county, Illinois, and daughter of John and Sarah (Linton) Linebarger, the former a native of North Carolina who moved to Indiana when he was eight years old, and the latter born in Illinois. They were married in Indiana, then moved to Will county, Illinois. The father was a farmer and prospered in his enterprise. Both are now deceased, the father having died in 1885 and the mother in 1903. Doctor and Mrs. Cowell have one child, their daughter Hazel, now fourteen years old. Mrs. Cowell’s first husband was Ara Brown, who she married in1881. He was a native of Will county, Illinois, where they were married, and where he died on his farm in 1882 lamented by all who knew him.
Source: Bowen, A. W. Progressive Men of Western Colorado. Chicago: A. W. Bowen & Co., Publishers. 1905.