Samuel Bowker 1868-1883

Headstone GPS Coordinates: location unknown

Birth: 1868, Maine

Death: 08 June 1883, Seabeck, Kitsap County, Washington, USA

Relatives in Seabeck Cemetery: Frances Fayette (Cilley) Bowker.

American Revolutionary War Patriots*: Ichabod Bonney, Jr. of Massachusetts (A012028), and William Cilley of Massachusetts (A021979). Major Levi B. Bowker of Massachusetts (A012833).

Disclaimer: These lines have not been officially proven by NSDAR standards.

Samuel Bowker was born in 1868 in Maine to Simeon Crocker Bowker and Frances Fayette (Cilley) Bowker. He was one of six children in the Bowker family and grew up during a period of transition, as his family moved from coastal Maine to the lumber camps of Washington Territory.

Samuel’s parents married in Machias, Maine, in 1853. His father, Simeon, worked in the lumber industry, a demanding and often dangerous occupation, while also owning land valued at $1,200 and personal property valued at $100. Samuel’s early childhood was spent in Maine, where five of the Bowker children were born. His youngest brother, Frank, was later born in Seabeck, Washington, indicating the family’s westward relocation during Samuel’s youth.

By 1870, Simeon Bowker appeared twice in the U.S. Federal Census—once with his family in Machias, Maine, and again in Union, Mason County, Washington—reflecting the divided nature of the family during this period. By 1872, Simeon was employed by the Washington Mill Company in Seabeck as a bull puncher, driving oxen and hauling logs to tidewater via skid road. Company store records from the early 1870s show purchases of household goods, suggesting that Samuel and his siblings either had arrived in Seabeck or were preparing to join their father there.

These same records also reveal the physical toll of mill work. Simeon frequently purchased painkillers and liniment, offering insight into the harsh labor environment Samuel would soon experience firsthand.

In the 1880 U.S. census, twelve-year-old Samuel was living in Seabeck in the household of his sister Martha (Mattie) and her husband, Ensley Doncaster, along with his parents and brothers. Just one year later, on October 15, 1881, Samuel’s mother Frances died at the age of forty-eight. Jacob Hauptly, the Seabeck Cemetery caretaker, recorded in his diary that there was “a large turnout” at her burial—a significant event in Samuel’s young life.

Despite his youth, Samuel soon joined the workforce. In the 1883 Washington Territorial Census, his life appears in two conflicting entries. One lists him incorrectly as seven years old in his father’s household, while another, six pages earlier, records “Sam’l Bowker,” age fourteen, born in Maine, working as a “mill man” at the Port of Seabeck. This latter entry more accurately reflects Samuel’s circumstances, as he was already employed in the lumber industry as a teenager.

Tragically, Samuel’s working life was brief. On June 8, 1883, at just fifteen years old, he was killed in a mill accident. Jacob Hauptly noted that Samuel was buried two days later. According to historian Fred Just’s records, Samuel’s grave was marked with a cedar slab—now lost—similar to others once common in Seabeck Cemetery.

Later accounts misidentified the victim of the mill accident as Samuel’s father, Simeon, but census records confirm that Simeon was still alive and living in Seabeck in 1887. Samuel’s younger brother Frank, then eight years old, was living with the Doncaster family, who had a young child of their own.

The exact location of Samuel Bowker’s grave within Seabeck Cemetery is now unknown, as is the burial place of his mother. What remains of Samuel’s story is pieced together through census records, mill ledgers, and cemetery notes—documents that reveal the realities of child labor, family loss, and the dangers of industrial work in Washington Territory.