Lowe, Ralph P.

Born: 1805-11-27 Ohio

Died: 1883-12-22 Washington, DC

Flourished: 1839 to 1868 Iowa

Ralph P. Lowe, attorney and public official, was born in Warren County, Ohio, and worked on his family’s farm before attending Miami University. Lowe graduated in 1829, then spent five years in Alabama, where he taught school and read law. He was admitted to the bar and practiced law in Alabama before returning to Ohio around 1834 and opening a law office in Dayton. About 1839 he relocated to Iowa Territory, where he continued to practice law, settling first near what is now the town of Muscatine, and then moving by 1850 to Keokuk. Lowe served in the Iowa constitutional convention of 1844 and ran unsuccessfully as a Whig Party candidate for territorial delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1845. Between 1852 and 1857 he was judge of Iowa’s first district, and in the latter year he was elected governor of Iowa, becoming the first governor of the state elected on a Republican ticket. Lowe was governor for one two-year term and then was elected to the Iowa Supreme Court in 1860, where his seven-year service included four years as chief justice. He married Phoebe Carleton in 1837 and the pair had numerous children.

Charles E. Payne, “Lowe, Ralph Phillips,” Dictionary of American Biography (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1933), 11:451-52; Robert Sobel and John Raimo, eds., Biographical Directory of the Governors of the United States 1789-1978 (Westport, CT: Meckler Books, 1978), 2:431; Ohio, U.S., County Marriage Records, 1774-1993, 18 April 1837, Montgomery County (Lehi, UT: Ancestry.com Operations, 2016); U.S. Census Office, Seventh Census of the United States (1850), Keokuk, Lee County, IA, 413; U.S. Census Office, Eighth Census of the United States (1860), Keokuk, Lee County, IA, 2; Muscatine Weekly Journal (IA), 28 December 1883, 2:2; Gravestone, Glenwood Cemetery, Washington, DC.