Robert M. McCowan
Robert M. McCowan was born about 1840 in Pennsylvania. In 1860 a Robert M. Mc Cowen of twenty-one was living in the household of Aaron Whitaker at McKeesport in Allegheny County, and that is probably him. His parents are not known.
In the summer of 1864 he married Olive Ashworth of McClure Township, the youngest daughter of the late Joseph Ashworth of Reserve Township. She was still single on 4 May and his wife by 15 July. That day the two of them sold her one-eighth share of her father's three lots to her brother Samuel Ashworth for $337.50. He signed the deed "Robt McCowan".
In 1867 he and Robert Thornburg, the husband of Olive's sister Sarah, bought two lots on the Perrysville plank road in McClure Township for $3,550. They came out of the estate of a Robert Ashworth who had died in 1865, probably Olive's brother.
By 1869 he was in business in Allegheny City, the separate city across the river from Pittsburgh. R. M. McCowan & Co., Boulevard Pavers, kept an office at No. 65 Ohio Street, and its advertisement ran in the Pittsburgh Gazette all that year. His partner was J. R. McKown. The firm held the local rights to a patent pavement called the Boulevard. The Gazette praised it as solid, clean and pretty, and more durable than brick or flagstone.
The business did not last long. A second partnership, McCowan & Snyder, was dissolved on 1 January 1870. That August he dissolved the paving firm as well, signing the notice ROBERT M. McCOWAN, Allegheny City, August 11, 1870. He carried the business on alone and settled the old firm's accounts. The census found him that summer in Allegheny's second ward, aged thirty, with his wife Olive and their two little girls. In May 1875 he was suing a John Nelson in the county courts.
The paver is almost certainly this Robert. The years and the city match, and no other Robert M. McCowan is known in Allegheny then.
By 1880 the family had moved out to Allegheny Township on the river above Pittsburgh, with Erminie, Ira and Maud. Alan Clyde arrived in 1884, when Robert was in his forties. A Robert M. McCowan appears at Elizabeth on the 1890 special schedule of Union veterans of the Civil War, likely him though not proven. Olive died in 1896 and he followed in 1898. Both are buried at Union Dale Cemetery on Pittsburgh's North Side. The youngest boy was left an orphan at fourteen.
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Cite: Heirology, "Robert M. McCowan (1840-1898)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/robert-m-mccowan-1840-1898-de074b.