Edward J. Lowry

Edward J. Lowry, 1855-1905
Sheriff in Ferry County, Washington
 
Buried in Rosedale Cemetery, exact location unknown

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Edward J. Lowry was born in 1855 in Carbon Township, Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania. He was the son of Irish immigrants Michael Lowry and Bridget Conley. 
 
Huntingdon was coal-mining country, and Michael was a miner. He may also have been a member of the Molly Maguires, a secret society whose intent was to counter the exploitation and terrible working conditions of coal miners. The Molly Maguires are sometimes considered a precursor to the labor unions of later decades. If Michael was involved with the Molly Maguires, perhaps that was why the Lowry family left Pennsylvania for Saline County, Ohio. By 1870, Edward, aged 15, was himself working in the coal mines there.
 
In 1877, Edward married Sarah Humphrey. The young couple moved to Boulder, Colorado, where their first child, Edward, Jr., was born in 1879. Edward continued to work as a miner, and he also became an organizer for a short-lived union, the Knights of Labor.
 
Something must have intervened in the late 1880s to set Edward on a different path. Sarah was living temporarily with her parents in Bevier, Missouri, when the Lowrys’ second son, Ralph, was born on April 18, 1889. A decade later, in 1900, the family had reunited in Republic, Washington, a sparsely populated region in the far West. Edward and his older son were still working as coal miners until, in late 1900, Edward was elected sheriff of Ferry County.
 
Apparently, Edward was pretty good at his job. The local newspapers printed detailed accounts of the sheriff’s activities, including the time when five prisoners sawed through the wooden ceiling of their cell and escaped via the roof on Christmas morning, 1901. Hot on the trail of the fugitives, Sheriff Lowry caught up with two of them three days later, just as they were in the act of robbing the customers of a saloon!
 
January 1904 brought a case of a personal nature. Sheriff Lowry’s wife Sarah, who had been suffering from an unspecified mental illness, escaped from the Mount View sanitarium in Spokane. Fortunately, she was found the next day at a local hotel.
 
By 1905, Lowry was suffering from tuberculosis. Seeking a warmer climate, he and his 16-year-old son Ralph set out by train for Phoenix, Arizona, arriving on October 9th. Perhaps the long trip had exhausted Lowry’s strength, for he died the following day. The Fraternal Order of Eagles arranged for his funeral and burial in Rosedale Cemetery.
 
Lowry’s son Ralph graduated from Washington State College in 1917 with a degree in civil engineering. He was eventually employed as a senior engineer for the U. S. Bureau of Reclamation and worked on the Hoover Dam, the Shasta Dam, and the Grand Coulee Dam.
 
© 2013 by Joseph P. Lowry. Last revised December 30, 2024.

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