I remember the afternoon at Mount Hope Cemetery. Harriette Wade was positively gleeful when, after searching the rows of headstones, she at last found what she was looking for. “Here he is!” she shouted, brushing away a few leaves to read the marble inscription aloud: “George A. Cowles, Founder of Cowlestown.”
Please believe me when I tell you that Harriette was in love with George. Never mind that he had been dead for 105 years, there was a deep fondness here. She had come to learn and document almost everything about him.
In 1887 George Cowles owned about 4,000 acres in the El Cajon Valley, where he planted a wonderful variety of fruits, olives, and grain. He also raised thoroughbred horses and polo ponies and tirelessly worked to create and build his little community called Cowlestown. “He was determined to make it a nice place,” Harriette told me.
And then he died. The story is that he worked so hard on Cowlestown that it killed him at age 51. And as long as I knew her, she was fiercely protective of his legacy, especially when it came to the one thing that irked her to no end. You see, San Diegans most often mispronounce his name.
A few hundred thousand of us every year climb to the highest point in our city by hiking up the trail to the peak of Cowles Mountain in Mission Trails Regional Park. The vast majority calling it “COWels” Mountain, but Harriette always insisted his name was correctly said as “KOHLs.” (Like hot coals). It perplexed her that it never quite caught on. “Is it so hard to remember?” To me it always made sense. If my name were spelled B-o-w-l-e-s, I sure wouldn’t want folks messing that up.
Well, the more Harriette learned about George Cowles, the more she felt his legacy deserved more. For starters, after his death, his widow married again, and shortly thereafter, the Cowlestown name began disappearing as her new husband, Milton Santee gained prominence and influence. Thus today, you have to go pretty far back in history to find many references to George Cowles, whose only lasting landmark is that mountain bearing his name, if we could just get it right.
For her part, Harriette, longtime President of the Santee Historical Society, championed the cause ’til her death in 2006. Honestly, the Society took a few years to recover and the Cowles (Kohls) name pronunciation campaign sort of died with her. But I think she would be heartened to know that the past few years have seen more hikers who have found it easier to remember. He deserves it, and so does she.
