Peter Rowley

  General Notes:

Research of Stan Wickham on www.rootsweb.com - Peter may have been born in Stephentown.
Peter Rowley first appears in local records as a fisherman, living in Green Bay, who in 1835 moved his family to Sherwood Point, located on the west shore of the mouth of Sturgeon Bay. The family consisted of Peter, his wife and two daughters. The building of his log shanty that year made him the first white settler on Sturgeon Bay. Three years later, he "entered" a tract of fifty acres on Sherwood Point, one of the earliest land entries in Door County. One of his daughters, Maryett, married Neil McMillin, a young fisherman who had settled at Little Harbor just across the mouth of the bay from the Rowley cabin. Their first child may have been the first white child born on the shores of Sturgeon Bay.
By 1840, the McMillin family moved to Rock Island and about the same time Peter Rowley moved his family north around the tip of the peninsula and settled down on its eastern shore on the bay which was named after him. During his stay there, he apparently cut logs as well as fished.
In 1842, he moved south down the peninsula to its base and settled in the Town of Two Rivers, Manitowoc County, building his house on another small bay which was eventually named for him. He was joined in 1849 by his son-in-law. In 1859, when the area in which Peter Rowley had been the first settler was separated from the Town of Two Rivers and formed into a new township, it was named Rowley Township and Neil McMillin was elected as one of its supervisors. A few years later, in 1861, the electors voted unanimously at an annual town meeting to change the name from Rowley - "which is objectionable on account of personal association" - to the name of Two Creeks, which it now bears.
At the outbreak of the Civil War, Peter Rowley enlisted as a drummer in Co. E, 14th Wisconsin Infantry. He claimed to have been a drummer in the War of 1812 and to have been stationed at Sackett Port, New York where the first shots of the war were exchanged and where, in 1813, a British landing had been repulsed. When the company was mustered in however, Rowley was rejected because of his age - estimated at between sixty and seventy years.

Quote from a book Mike B found: "Mike Borchardt" < mikeborchardt@hotmail.com
"Mrs. Rowley died in 1867 at the
age of 70. Peter passed away at 84 in
1879. What is remarkable is that the
Rowley s, married for 53 years, lived
so long. At the time of their deaths
average life spans were only 50 years
for both men and women. And the
Rowley's lived long lives in tents and
drafty cabins existing on fish and
wild game without benefit of even
minimal medical care!"

Peter married Alice Dustin. (Alice Dustin was born on 11 Nov 1798 in Stark, Coos County, New Hampshire and died in 1865 in Martin County, Minnesota.)