Oliver Cowls (1735-1799) was born in a district of Hadley, Massachusetts, that later became the town of Amherst, Massachusetts. He was the first of nine children born to Jonathan and Sarah (Gaylord) Cowls. A farmer like his father and a lifelong resident of Amherst, Oliver married Irene (Dickinson) Cowls (1734-1834) in 1762.
A letter in the Cowls (also spelled Cowles) family papers at the Jone Library in Amherst reveals that Oliver Cowls purchased an enslaved child named Wealthy Wheeler (c1785-1871) from Samuel Parsons of Northampton in about 1790, years after Massachusetts court decisions in the 1780s ruling that slavery was unconstitutional under the state's constitution.
Oliver Cowls died in Amherst in 1799. Wealthy Wheeler continued working in the Cowls household without wages until the death of Oliver and Irene's son Oliver Jr. in 1850. (James Avery Smith's History of the Black Population of Amherst, Massachusetts, 1728-1870, p. 10, 130-131.)
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