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WHO WAS WHO in PLUM TOWNSHIP
~ Titusville Herald ~
By H. W. Strawbridge

William Pickering Cowen

William Pickering Cowen was born in Plum Township on April 4, 1852, the oldest son of James and Catherine Rickey Cowen. He was educated in the old Fairview School.

He was popularly called “Pick” Cowen. He and his brothers, John Henry and Frank, and also the Green brothers who lived nearby, were called the “hill boys” because they lived on the hill above Wallaceville. They used to pull a few Halloween stunts, according to ones who heard the boys later mention them.
Pick was married on Oct. 30, 1877, to Ida Ann Carpenter of Wallaceville with the Methodist pastor, Rev. T.W. Douglas, performing the rites. Ida, born Oct. 14, 1852, was one of seven children of Samuel and Ellen Jones Carpenter, and she was the only child who reached old age.
Pick and Ida began housekeeping on 65 acres in the southern section of the township. He had acquired this through his father, who owned it. It was a part of the original old Cowen tract. The young couple lived in a small house with a spring nearby.
During the first two winters following his marriage, Pick taught school. The first winter, in 1878, he taught school at Hannaville with an average enrollment of 37 pupils. He taught the Wallaceville school the next winter with an average of 30 pupils. He received $28 a month at this latter school.
He then devoted his time to his farm of which he cleared a portion. He hauled many loads of stone, filling a ravine with them.
Pick and Ida spent their married life on this farm. He was a neat and successful farmer. He dug out the daisies, kept the brush from growing in the fence-rows and maintained the farm buildings in the best of shape.
He always had jobs prepared on rainy days, such as sewing harness, repairing machinery, etc. He made it a point to cut a winter’s supply of wood and rank it in the woodshed and also a supply of green chunk wood to hold fire at nights.
Bad luck plagued him on a couple of nice horses he once had. One time he tied the team in front of an Oil City grocery store. One, a Clydesdale mare, got scared at something and ran away. She ran in to a telephone pole and the impact killed her.
At another time one of his young horses ran down the lane and struck a rail which was driven fatally into its breast. He nearly sold this horse a few days beforehand, but lacked a few dollars of attaining his price. He then regretted that he hadn’t sold it.
Pick and Ida were the parents of three children, who with their dates of births, were: Bertha May Cowen, May 30, 1882; Albert Samuel Cowen, March 7, 1887; and Nellie Katherine Cowen, June 14, 1897.
The first two children died in infancy.
Nellie was married on June 18, 1919, to William C. Weber of near Sunville. They first lived near Sunville where he farmed. They later moved to Gresham, and he worked in a feed mill in Titusville for several years. On Sept. 5, 1937, he died from the result of an accident in the mill. Mrs. Weber has now lived in Titusville for several years. They have two sons, Wayne C. Weber of Oil City, and Maurice C. Weber of Titusville.
Pick and Ida Cowen were baptized by immersion at Wallaceville in June, 1877, by Rev. T. W. Douglas. A few years later they united with the Wallaceville Methodist Church and remained lifelong active members. He united during the pastorate of Rev. I. G. Pollard, an active minister in the work of saving souls.
Pick became Sunday school superintendent in 1887 and served probably intermittently in that position until 1903. He was also a church trustee, parsonage trustee and steward for several years. In 1913 and 1914 he was named as “trier of appeals” for the charge. During this same period he was on the auditing committee. Both Pick and Ida taught Sunday school classes for a time. He taught the Bible class and she taught the beginners. In April, 1906, he was appointed as a committee to supervise the building of the horse sheds for the church which were completed by early summer.
At the front corner of the old church there stood a large red oak tree. In this tree was stapled a large iron ring to which Pick generally tied his horse when attending church, prior to the construction of the new sheds. By the time the tree was cut down in 1953 (the same year the church was razed) the ring was completely covered by the growth of the tree.
In the early 1920s the congregation decided to partition off a third of the church and make it into an aid society room. Pick was very much against this, but the majority favored it so it was done.
Pick was also very much against the township school board’s decision to close the nearby Hoover school in 1912. The school had so few pupils that it was deemed inadvisable to operate it any longer.
W. P. Cowen was about 5 feet, 8 inches tall, and ordinarily weighed 200 pounds until his last year and a half when he lost considerable weight. He was bald, and he blamed a case of scarlet fever in 1875 for that. His hair commenced to drop out after that illness.
Sometime after his marriage, Pick had a severe case of Typhoid fever. He was normally recuperating and finally got outdoors. One day he walked towards the place of his neighbor, Uncle Jack Cowan, and stopped in the orchard to eat an apple. It resulted in a terrible relapse from which he nearly died. He never told the family about his eating the apple until he got well. He knew it was a foolish thing to do at the time, and he decided that if he were to die, he would take the reason for the relapse to the grave with him.
The fact that people knew him as “Pick” didn’t disturb him in the least. He remarked that he didn’t care what people called him, just so they didn’t call him late for dinner!
In 1896 he was elected a justice of the peace in Plum, and he served at least one term.
Around the turn of the century Pick had a new house constructed, hiring Israel Mark of Dempseytown to carpenter the structure. Mark stayed there during the week, then went home on weekends.
On the afternoon of Oct. 16, 1906, Pick’s barn burned down with a loss of $2,000 including 22 tons of hay and other feed. Pick and his brother, Frank, had been hauling shocks of corn into the barn. They were in the field loading when they looked over and discovered flames leaping out of the lower door.
Pick has always blamed the cause of the fire on a wagon wheel grinding over a match that had been dropped on the floor by one of several oil drillers who had been around the place at the time.
Pick got through the winter by tearing down a shed on the place of his brother, John Henry, and rebuilding it on his own place. During the winter and early spring of 1907, Pick kept busy cutting out timbers for his new barn. Israel Mark also carpentered it. The raising was on June 20 with many neighbors on hand.
Oliver and Forest Proper of Tionesta drilled wells for oil on Pick’s farm around 1906. They got a small amount of oil and a decent showing of gas. The gas was piped to Pick’s house for heat. At the time of Pick’s death there were about half a dozen wells still pumping.
The only vacation Pick ever had was in September 1923, when his son-in-law and daughter, Bill and Nellie, took him to Meadville where he hopped the train bound for Westfield, N.Y., to visit cousins, George and Grace Cowan. He was gone a few days and had visited Niagara Falls.
Pick bought a 1926 Ford touring car, and he and Ida got considerable pleasure from it. It is said that when driving he really sat stiff and straight.
On the morning of Feb. 5, 1927, Pick suffered a stroke from which he slowly recovered, although his sense of balance was permanently affected. This illness caused him to lose much weight.
On Oct. 29, 1927, Pick and Ida celebrated their golden wedding at their home with a great number of relatives and friends present. The exact date for the anniversary fell on a Sunday, but since Pick was opposed to such celebrations on the Sabbath, it was held on Saturday. A program was held, and it was a nice day. The photograph was taken on that day.
During 1928 he failed gradually with heart and kidney ailments, and the end came in the very early morning hours of Sunday, Sept. 9, that year.
Strangely, his brother, John Henry, died about seven hours later from a stroke suffered three days previously.
Pick’s funeral was conducted on Tuesday afternoon in the Wallaceville Church with a former minister, Rev. L. W. Miller, officiating. Burial was in the church cemetery. The undertaker was the late C. H. McKinley, then of Cooperstown.
Very few years later the family sold the farm to a man named Graham of Grove City. The Sam Sterns family now lives on the place.
Ida died at the home of her daughter in Gresham on Feb. 20, 1940, aged 87. She had contracted the flu, and was bedfast only three or four days.

Transcribed by Chrissy Wolfgong

Disclaimer:there may be errors due to transcription of information from both early and late (current contributors) work.