Thomas Salter Bowles
Thomas Salter Bowles (c. 1765-?) is another elusive New England instrument maker about whom little information is available. He is believed to have been the son of Deacon Samuel and Hannah (Salter) Bowles, born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, probably between 1765 and 1770. His father was born in 1739; his mother, who was the daughter of Captain Titus Salter, was born in 1748 and died in 1831.[124] Deacon Bowles was clerk of the Brick Market in Portsmouth from 1801 to the time of his death, November 3, 1802. There is a minimum of information available from church and city records in the community, but it is believed that he was a member of one of the offshoots of the established Puritan Church, and hence he would not appear in its records. He kept the lower school in the Brick School House on State Street for a number of years.
It is believed that the Bowles family first came to Portsmouth during the few years immediately before the beginning of the Revolutionary War. It is known that a Thomas Bowles and a Samuel Bowles both signed the Association Test on August 14, 1776, promising to oppose the hostile proceedings of the British fleets and armies. Furthermore, one of the principal taxpayers in Portsmouth in 1770 was a firm named Griffith and Bowles, which paid £17 in taxes in 1770. The name of the Bowles who formed part of this firm is not known, but it was either Samuel or the first Thomas Bowles. The other partner was Nathaniel S. Griffith, a watchmaker. It is possible that a tradition of instrument making existed in the Bowles family even then.[125]
On file in the office of the City Clerk in Portsmouth are two certificates of marriage made out by Thomas Salter Bowles. The first is for his marriage to Hannah Ham, a ceremony performed on September 21, 1809, by Joseph Walton, one of the pastors of a church dissenting from the Puritan regime. Hannah was the daughter of William Ham, a brother of Supply Ham (1788-1862), a noted local clockmaker. Bowles may have served an apprenticeship in that shop before he married Hannah. Two other members of the Ham family—George Ham and Henry H. Ham—worked as watchmakers in Portsmouth in the same period.
A search of the cemeteries has indicated that Hannah Ham Bowles died in 1811, age 20. She is buried with her infant son in North Cemetery.[126]
Thomas Bowles's second marriage certificate in Portsmouth is for his marriage on September 29, 1813—two years after Hannah's death—to Abiah Emerly Bradley of Haverhill, Massachusetts.
Little is known about the work of Bowles as an instrument maker except through a few of his instruments. He is listed in the first Portsmouth directory, of 1821, as a "mathematical instrument maker" with a place of business on Daniel Street; his home was given as Austin Street in Portsmouth. He did not appear in the city's directories of 1827 and 1834. It is assumed that he may have left Portsmouth in the interim, possibly to settle in his wife's home town of Haverhill.
Three instruments signed by Bowles have survived, and all show signs of considerable wear. They are surveying compasses made of walnut, having maple sighting bars and a silvered brass vernier set under the glass. Two examples, one in the Streeter Collection of Weights and Measures at Yale University and one owned by this writer are almost identical in size, form, and details. The only variation is that the Yale example (fig. 67) has a bubble level under a brass strip set into one end, an item lacking in the other example (fig. 68).
The compass card, made from a line engraving, is identical in each of the three examples. A floriated fleur-de-lis on the North point has a compass and square at its base, and the name T. S. BOWLES is on a riband over it. Adorning the East point is an American eagle bearing a shield with stars and stripes and clutching arrows in one claw and a laurel twig in the other. In a ring within the central medallion is inscribed (see fig. 68), "* T. S. BOWLES * PORTSMOUTH, N.H. *"
