I have not found any proof in the Bowen Papers or anything mentioned by Phillip Tucker that Mary Bowen, wife of Maj. Gen. John Bowen, was in any way in the Battle of Allatoona Pass. I have chased down all of the credits given about this subject and I would summarize that the conclusion that Mary Bowen was a female combatant yet to be proven. What can be proven is that after Major General John Bowen died in 1863 - six miles west of Raymond - that his wife soon made her residence in Raymond, Mississippi, where she became a school teacher. The editor of a local newspaper captured her stay in Raymond saying that she taught at the Raymond Female Academy. Of Mary Bowen's residence in Raymond following her husband's death, the owner/editor of the paper stated, "Her former home in Missouri is no longer hers, and she has cast her lot for the future among us, for whose defense her husband's life was sacrificed. And she now asks the citizens of Hinds County such measure of encouragement as will enable her to live and raise her children among us."

After chasing down Tucker's description of Mary Bowen in a Georgia hospital - no name was given to a freckled-face woman who had been wounded - was lying on a cot smoking a corn cob pipe.....saying she had lost her husband and two brothers in the war.......but nowhere does the Phillip Tucker give concrete proof that the wounded woman was Mary Bowen.

I am with Sue Moore. If anyone has proof that she WAS the woman wounded in Georgia, please respond otherwise we will consider this a fabricated story. History should never be rewritten. Concrete proof will usually disprove a supposition as is apparently the case in this situation.

Rebecca Blackwell Drake
Historian and Civil War author, Raymond, Mississippi