Private Owen Fowler

November 9, 2018

Image: Alabama Department of Archives and HistoryOwen Fowler (standing at right in this photo) was born on March 30, 1894, in Hartselle, Morgan County. His father, Robert, was a former slave who briefly served in the Union Army near the end of the Civil War. Twelve members of the Fowler family lived together on their Morgan County farm.

Fowler worked the land with his parents and siblings and was employed at a local cotton gin. He signed his draft registration card with an “X” in June 1917 and indicated that he was employed as a laborer with the Louisville and Nashville Railroad Company in nearby Albany, Alabama.

Inducted into the U.S. Army at Decatur on October 28, 1917, Fowler was assigned as a bugler to Company E of the 366th Infantry Regiment, part of the fabled 92nd Division Buffalo Soldiers. He sailed for France in June 1918.

Nearly 3,500 soldiers in the American Expeditionary Forces died on the morning of November 11, 1918, before the cease-fire that would end the Great War at eleven o’clock. As his regiment advanced upon the town of Bouxieres in the Marbache Sector of France, Fowler was mortally wounded by shrapnel from a mortar shell. He died in a field hospital the following day, among the last of almost 2,500 Alabamians killed in France during the war.

Casualty reports published in the state’s newspapers shortly before Christmas erroneously reported that Private Fowler was wounded but alive. Official confirmation of his death arrived in Hartselle two months later. Fowler’s remains were returned to his family in May 1921. His older brother, Mordechai, later requested a government-issued headstone honoring Owen Fowler’s service to his country.