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The Cowls Companies are a unique agricultural, lumber and building materials business that blends the best of the last three centuries with the best of the new. In October 1741, Jonathan Cowls brought his family across the Connecticut River from Hatfield, Massachusetts, and settled on land he bought in what is now North Amherst. The Cowls were among the first five families to settle in Amherst, then part of Hadley. That original purchase off Meadow Street in North Amherst has been under continuous cultivation ever since and is contiguous with the site on which the Cowls Companies operate their mill and retail store today. Additional timberlands have been acquired since then in about 30 other towns in Hampshire and Franklin counties. Discover a family history that spans 250 years beginning with settler Jonathan Cowls in the town of North Amherst, Massachusetts. Today four of Jonathan Cowls' descendants - Paul Jones, Gert Como, Evan Jones, and Cinda Jones - still make their living on the family farm. In Cowls company timberlands, sawmill and planing mill, W. D. Cowls, Inc. grows, harvests, manufactures and wholesales pine, oak and hemlock lumber and other forest products. In the yard, warehouse, and retail store adjacent to the mill operations, Cowls Building Supply, Inc. retails lumber, paint, hardware and building materials through its full-line full service home center. Paul's wife Ruth Owen Jones, Clerk of the Corporation, is the historian in the family. She surmises that it was in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century that silviculture overshadowed agriculture as lumbering became the significant activity. In the early days it was too costly and cumbersome to bring logs to a permanent sawmill. Instead crews hauled portable mills into the woods to saw logs into lumber on site. Lumber milled by Walter Dickinson Cowls supplied railroad ties, posts, poles and lumber for the Amherst-Sunderland Street Railway in the late 1800s. In the early 1900's this same W.D.Cowls hired Massachusetts Agricultural College student Gerald Jones to help him. Gerald fell in love with Sarah, his boss' only child. With their marriage and the birth of their only child, Walter C. Jones, the Jones family name lives on, while the Cowls name is perpetuated by the Cowls Companies. At the turn of the century dairy farming was still an active business of the Cowls/Jones family. But as the new century advanced, so did technology. Improvements in milling equipment, trucking and roadways made it feasible to bring logs from the forest to a permanent mill. W.D.Cowls died in 1928. Less than a dozen years later, Gerald and his son Walter built on the old family farm what may have been New England's first electric sawmill. Later they built a planing mill. This allowed them to oversee all aspects of lumber manufacturing, from growing trees to producing a wide variety of finished products. Today a visitor will find a modern sawmill and planing mill under the old fashioned slate roofs of the original mill buildings. Cowls' first motorized vehicle, a log hauler purchased in 1912, measured over 26 feet long, and was too heavy for most bridges in town, breaking through several. The logs are harvested from several thousand acres owned by W.D.Cowls, Inc. in 31 towns in Hampshire and Franklin counties. The Cowls Tree Farms are managed by a full-time forestry division within the company and provide valuable open space made available for recreation and wildlife habitat. Miles of the popular Robert Frost Trail and the Metacomet-Monadnock Trail are on Cowls timberlands. In 1980 Cowls Building Supply was founded by partners on land adjacent to the W.D.Cowls sawmill, planing mill and drying yards. About one half of the two to three million board feet produced by the mill each year is sold through this retail outlet. The rest is sold on the wholesale market. Because inventory can be produced as needed from the adjacent mill, Cowls Building Supply can maintain a wider range of lengths, widths, grades, and patterns than is found at most lumber yards. A contractor or homeowner can conveniently select from individual bins a dozen or a single shiplap, tongue & groove, edge & center bead, etc. board in the desired width and length. This huge selection has earned gratitude and praise from contractors and other customers who find they can get just what they want, and use it with minimal waste. The continuity of the Cowls Companies 260+ year history is reflected in the continuous development of the Cowls Team. Born and raised "on the farm" the family members grow up in the lumber business and enjoy developing the expertise required to advance the business in their generation. In 1993 Evan Jones, the great grandson of the Mass Aggie student who married the boss' daughter 90 years earlier, graduated from the modern version of the same institution with a degree in Wood Technology. He is co-leading the company into the twenty-first century. Cowls Team non-family members also have long term commitments to the industry and to Cowls. Many have 10 years with the Company and are well equipped to provide the expertise necessary to satisfy both the contractor and the homeowner. Cowls People Make the Difference.