Daughters of the American Revolution, Amherst Chapter, A History of Cowls, Speech of Cinda Jones. March 18, 2003
Our family tree has been firmly planted in Amherst for nearly 300 years - Cowls time line
 

If the Cowls Companies were one of their own Eastern White Pine trees, its trunk would be 150 feet high, 50 inches in diameter, and reveal more than 260 annual rings.

The Cowls Companies are a unique agricultural, lumber and building materials business that blends the best of the last three centuries with the best of the new.

In October 1741, Jonathan Cowls brought his family across the Connecticut River from Hatfield, Massachusetts, and settled on land he bought in what is now North Amherst. The Cowls were among the first five families to settle in Amherst, then part of Hadley. That original purchase off Meadow Street in North Amherst has been under continuous cultivation ever since and is contiguous with the site on which the Cowls Companies operate their mill and retail store today. Additional timberlands have been acquired since then in about 30 other towns in Hampshire and Franklin counties.

Today four of Jonathan Cowls' descendants - Paul Jones, Gert Como, Evan Jones, and Cinda Jones - still make their living on the family farm. In Cowls company timberlands, sawmill and planing mill, W. D. Cowls, Inc. grows, harvests, manufactures and wholesales pine, oak and hemlock lumber and other forest products. In the yard, warehouse, and retail store adjacent to the mill operations, Cowls Building Supply, Inc. retails lumber, paint, hardware and building materials through its full-line full service home center.

Paul's wife Ruth Owen Jones, Clerk of the Corporation, is the historian in the family. She surmises that it was in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century that silviculture overshadowed agriculture as lumbering became the significant activity. In the early days it was too costly and cumbersome to bring logs to a permanent sawmill. Instead crews hauled portable mills into the woods to saw logs into lumber on site. Lumber milled by Walter Dickinson Cowls supplied railroad ties, posts, poles and lumber for the Amherst-Sunderland Street Railway in the late 1800s.

In the early 1900's this same W.D.Cowls hired Massachusetts Agricultural College student Gerald Jones to help him. Gerald fell in love with Sarah, his boss' only child. With their marriage and the birth of their only child, Walter C. Jones, the Jones family name lives on, while the Cowls name is perpetuated by the Cowls Companies.

At the turn of the century dairy farming was still an active business of the Cowls/Jones family. But as the new century advanced, so did technology. Improvements in milling equipment, trucking and roadways made it feasible to bring logs from the forest to a permanent mill. W.D.Cowls died in 1928. Less than a dozen years later, Gerald and his son Walter built on the old family farm what may have been New England's first electric sawmill. Later they built a planing mill. This allowed them to oversee all aspects of lumber manufacturing, from growing trees to producing a wide variety of finished products. Today a visitor will find a modern sawmill and planing mill under the old fashioned slate roofs of the original mill buildings.

The logs are harvested from several thousand acres owned by W.D.Cowls, Inc. in 31 towns in Hampshire and Franklin counties. The Cowls Tree Farms are managed by a full-time forestry division within the company and provide valuable open space made available for recreation and wildlife habitat. Miles of the popular Robert Frost Trail are on Cowls timberlands.

Cowls' first motorized vehicle, a log hauler purchased in 1912, measured  over 26 feet long, and was too heavy for most bridges in town, breaking through several.

In 1980 Cowls Building Supply was founded by partners on land adjacent to th e W.D.Cowls sawmill, planing mill and drying yards. About one half of the two to three million board feet produced by the mill each year is sold through this retail outlet. The rest is sold on the wholesale market.

Because inventory can be produced as needed from the adjacent mill, Cowls Building Supply can maintain a wider range of lengths, widths, grades, and patterns than is found at most lumber yards. A contractor or homeowner can conveniently select from individual bins a dozen or a single shiplap, tongue & groove, edge & center bead, etc. board in the desired width and length. This huge selection has earned gratitude and praise from contractors and other customers who find they can get just what they want, and use it with minimal waste.

The continuity of the Cowls Companies 260+ year history is reflected in the continuous development of the Cowls Team. Born and raised "on the farm" the family members grow up in the lumber business and enjoy developing the expertise required to advance the business in their generation. In 1993 Evan Jones, the great grandson of the Mass Aggie student who married the boss' daughter 90 years earlier, graduated from the modern version of the same institution with a degree in Wood Technology. He is co-leading the company into the twenty-first century. Cowls Team non-family members also have long term commitments to the industry and to Cowls. Many have 10 years with the Company and are well equipped to provide the expertise necessary to satisfy both the contractor and the homeowner.

Daughters of the American Revolution, Amherst Chapter
Speech of Cinda Jones, March 18, 2003

Thank you for inviting me to speak to you today about the history of the Cowls family and companies in Amherst. 
   John Cole was born in Gloucestershire England in about 1600, and moved to Weathersfield, CT in about 1640.
   In 1641 Hannah and John had a son, John Cowls (spelled COWLS), the first Cowls born in America.  John and Hannah Cowls traveled north to find religious freedom, and in 1660 founded what is now Hatfield, and then was part of Hadley, with the Dickinsons and Eastmans.   Hannah Cowls' grave stone can still be found in Hatfield.
   Two more generations of Hatfield Jonathan Cowlses followed in 1670 and 1703. In 1731 Jonathan Cowls moved to Amherst, we think to what is now the back portion of the Black Walnut Inn in North Amherst.  In 1741 he bought the home farm - the land on which our homestead and sawmill and auction barn now sit. That's why Cowls letterhead reads "Same location since 1741."
   In 1768 David Cowls built the homestead in which every generation of my family has lived in since! I am the 9th generation to live at 134 Montague Road. David had two sons, Silas Cowls and (of course a) JONATHAN Cowls
   Silas fought in the Revolutionary war and returned home to start the 2nd church which started out on the east street common and then moved to the current Jewish Community Center building. Silas was a revolutionary in every way.  He wanted independence from the Church of England and his family. He changed his name to Cowles - with an "e."  Silas then moved to Hadley and became a very successful farmer.  His descendent is Homer Cowles of South Amherst.
   Silas' brother, Jonathan, also a successful farmer, was a member of the First Church - which started out in Amherst College's octagon house before it moved to its current location on Main Street.  Johnathan later started the North Church in North Amherst.  Jonathan had a son (named Jonathan!) and he married Sarah Dickinson in 1851. W.D. Cowls was their son. 
   Walter Dickinson Cowls bought most of the timberland the Cowls Companies owns today. WD Cowls graduated from Mass Aggie and is credited with building many of the area's early roads. He also helped create the Amherst/Sunderland branch of the Holyoke Street Railway.  His woodlots supplied the railroad ties and poles as well as the timbers for bridges the railway crossed. The Amherst/Sunderland section of the street railway eventually connected with the Holyoke Street Railway at the Notch - where WDC established the rock crusher still at the Notch, now belonging to Lane Construction.  Because of limitations of transportation and electricity, WD used portable sawmills out in the woods to cut logs into lumber.   
   WD's daughter, Sarah Cowls, married Gerald Jones who came to school in Amherst at Mass Aggie from Nova Scotia. Upon graduating he started work at Cowls and married the boss' daughter.   Sarah Cowls Jones ran the family dairy and onion farm and Gerald Jones was a state representative and eventually took over the lumber business.
   Electricity and logging truck advances made it possible for their son, Walter Cowls Jones, to start bringing logs to a centrally located sawmill which he installed on the home farm site in North Amherst in the 1940s. 
   In the early 1980s, my father, Paul Jones, opened a retail store at the lumber yard, and since then Cowls Building Supply has become the most successful part of the corporation.  My aunt Gert and brother Evan run that retail store today.
   My job at Cowls is to manage the company's timberland, sawmill, and real estate operations.  I am working to keep unrestricted access to our timberland and am fighting two separate federal government take over attempts; I'm working with Evan to rebuild out sawmill that burned to the ground in July of last year; and I'm trying to improve the accountability and profitability of our rentals. 
   Today the Cowls sawmill gets about 50% of its logs from sustainably and selectively harvesting its own timberland. Cowls buys the remainder of the logs it needs from landowners and other companies.   About half of what the mill saws is sold through Cowls Building Supply, and the rest is sold to timber framers and to other wholesale and retail markets.  Cowls manages its timberland in order to optimize wood generated, enhance wildlife, provide public recreation opportunities, and assure abundant clean water supplies.  Some of the animals that can be found on Cowls timberland are deer, moose, bear, beaver, grouse, ducks, and song birds. Cowls has 11 acres of Christmas Trees that are sold locally by the boy scouts. Cowls has about 300 acres of timberland in Amherst.   And thousands more in other towns in Hampshire and Franklin Counties. Cowls over the generations has had a consistant policy of buying timberland with the view of holding onto it for the long term.  The long term for us is for hundreds of years!  Although we do sometimes sell property, our basic policy is to buy more than we sell.  If you know any reasonably priced timberland for sale, please let us know.
   Something else of potential interest to you is that we sometimes help area landowners gain lower tax rates and periodic income by managing their forest land free of charge in exchange for the opportunity to buy their timber rights.  Beyond income, this relationship gives people who own more than ten acres of forest land, -healthier forests, -better wildlife habitat, greater oxegyn generation, and property tax rates of about 10% the norm.

Thanks again for asking me to come in and speak with you about the Cowls family and company history. I'd be happy to try to answer any questions you may have.