Paul Rowe and Beda Franks Rowe

Paul Rowe married Beda Ellen Franks on February 10, 1916.

Paul Holmes Rowe, born in Amity, was the son of Martin and Celia Eliza Miller Rowe.

Beda Ellen Franks, born in Pike City, Pike County, Arkansas, was the daughter of James Ervin Franks and Mary Caroline Wisener. Mary Caroline Wisener was the daughter of Jeptha Jackson Wisener and Nancy Margaret Greeson, the progenitors of a very large and extended Wisener family, many of whom still live in Amity and Glenwood today.

Paul and Beda Rowe were the parents of Ellen Rowe, Paul Holmes Rowe, Jr. and Sharon Marie Rowe.  Marie married Ernest Echols, who was a long-time postmaster of Amity.

(at left: Paul Rowe and Beda Franks)

The Rowe's are descended from ancestors who emigrated to Arkansas from Alabama and Georgia in the 1870's, but much earlier, the Rowe family was among the very first English settlers of the colony of Connecticut in the New World. A group of Puritans from England, financed by Owen Rowe, a prosperous merchant in London, emigrated from England to Massachusetts in the mid-1600's. But upon their arrival in Massachusetts, the Rowe Puritans found that their earlier-arrived Puritan brethren in Massachusetts had become too lax in their religious observances, so the Rowe Puritans got back on their ship and kept moving. They settled on the Connecticut coastline and founded the town of New Haven. Matthew Rowe was one of the leaders of the New Haven colony, and later signed one of the earliest versions of a Constitution which governed New Haven. Amity's Paul Rowe is a direct descendant of Matthew Rowe.



Paul Rowe's nephew, Truett Rowe, who was born in Amity in 1904, made national headlines in 1937 when he became only the 11th F.B.I. "G-Man" to be killed in the line of duty since the formation of the F.B.I. in 1908. In the 100+ year history of the F.B.I., less than 60 agents have been killed in the line of duty, and each of those men is enshrined in the F.B.I. Hall of Honor.