Sam P. ROWAN, attorney and counselor at law, was born in Blount County, in 1838, and raised on a farm five miles east of Maryville. He was educated principally in Porter Academy and Maryville College. He read law from 1860 until 1862, when he entered the Federal Army and served as Captain in the Second Tennessee (Union) Cavalry until the spring of 1864, when, on account of bad health, he resigned. He was admitted to the bar in 1865, at Maryville, Tenn., and has practiced his profession there ever since. He was a member of the Legislature of 1885-86 as senator from the Sixth Senatorial District.
His ancestry is of the old Scotch-Irish stock which first settled in Virginia, the Carolinas and Tennessee. His two grandfathers, George BERRY and Samuel ROWAN, came from Virginia, the former about the year 1792, and the latter a few years after. They both died in Blount County.
Source: Goodspeed Publishing Co. History of Tennessee from the Earliest Time to the Present: Together with an Historical and a Biographical Sketch of from Twenty-Five to Thirty Counties of East Tennessee. Chicago: Goodspeed, 1887.