Background
Ralph Phillips Lowe was born on November 27, 1805, in Warren County, Ohio, United States. He was the son of Jacob Derrick and Martha (Per-Lee) Lowe.
Grave of Ralph P. Lowe
Ralph Phillips Lowe was born on November 27, 1805, in Warren County, Ohio, United States. He was the son of Jacob Derrick and Martha (Per-Lee) Lowe.
As he grew up, Ralph Lowe had to work hard on the family farm, which was also a stagecoach stop and an inn for travelers. His mother died when he was just five. His father remarried two more times, moving the family to Miami County, Ohio, then to Cincinnati, and finally to Dayton, where he died in 1839. Of Jacob’s five sons, three, including Ralph, became lawyers.
Ralph Lowe attended Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, graduating in i829 at the age of 24. His father offered to give him a farm on the outskirts of Chicago, but Ralph had other plans. With two friends, he headed south to Alabama on horseback, hoping to get a job teaching while studying law.
Ralph Lowe settled in the town of Muscatine and was selected as a representative of the Iowa state constitutional convention in 1844. He moved to Lee County at the end of the 1840s and became the district judge succeeding George Henry Williams. He became an Iowa state court judge in 1852.
In 1857 Ralph Lowe was nominated as the Republican candidate for Governor of Iowa, with Oran Faville as his Lieutenant. At the end of his term, he was appointed as a justice of the Iowa Supreme Court, which he served between 1860 and 1867. He resumed practicing law, and in 1874 moved to Washington, District of Columbia, where he died on 22 December 1883. He was interred at Glenwood Cemetery.