JOSEPH G. COWELL

Joe lived at 424 South Street, Wrentham, was a veteran of WW I, enlisting on Aug 12 1918, became a sergeant first class in Company C, 336^th Battalion of the Casual Tank Corps. His daughter Jean wrote a poem about Kenneth Ames, a Wrentham fighter aircraft pilot who was lost in WWII. When Jean died, Joe wanted her to be remembered, so he had Herbert Marsden of Foxboro, a printer and bookbinder, to make a book and in exchange he painted a portrait of Herb. Joe also painted the portrait of Dr George L. Vogel, in WW I uniform, which is presently hanging in the hall of the Vogel School on Taunton Street, with eight paintings of Wrentham houses which were sponsored by the Works Progress Administration during the depression. There is also a Cowell painting in the Wampum House and Mrs. Dana of West Street had two, some of his twenty paintings.  Joe was commissioned by the town to prepare the flagpole base on the western common. The monument was suggested by Rev. Melville A. Shafer of the Original Congregational Church and the town appropriated $300 and various other sources contributed the balance. Several artists had submitted designs and Cowell’s was accepted. The flagstaff base is of bronze, six feet in height by four feet square at the bottom. The four corner buttresses, flanking the inscription panels, contain the names of soldiers who went to WW I from Wrentham are in the form of a Sphinx-like winged shape which suggest as well the Greek God of sleep, Hypros. These together with the wreaths, laurel and poppies, form the collar of the staff, completing the memorial symbolism. The contract called for the monument to be ready on Memorial Day 1937. Joe offered to do free painting of girls when they became 16 and those paintings are in the possession of the subjects. A female nude painting was in the basement of the old Fiske Library and when a female employee found giggling boys looking at it, she had the nude painted black, which destroyed the Cowell painting on the reverse side.  JJM