Bowman's Castle, also known as Nemacolin Castle, was built in stages at the western terminus of the Nemacolin's Trail on the east bank of the Monongahela river from a wooden trading post itself built on or near the site of the French and Indian War's Fort Burd. The trading post was built initially in the mid-to-latter 1780s, and the castle begun on the site during the mid-to-late 1790s by Jacob Bowman in what was once known as Redstone and the land development soon transitioned to the eponymously derived Brownsville, after the land owner developing the section, Thomas Brown name="BVilleHistSociety">, in what had become Fayette County, Pennsylvania in 1783. The trading post was located at the Redstone Creek river crossing, fledgling river boat building community and the long-time terminus of the western part of Nemacolin's Trail upon or near the site of Old Fort Burd.
The fort had been established in the late 1750s near the mounds called Redstone Old Fort at the end of easier road westward and down to the Ohio from the summit of the Cumberland Gap. The trail, the western part of which from the 1760s became known as Burd's roadlead from the Monongehela at Redstone and the trading post through Uniontown up to the split with Braddock's Road not far from the Gap's summit and very near to Fort Necessity. As the route was the easiest path to haul cargo westwards, it and the castle became a natural intermediate destination for settlers looking to utilize the rivers of the Ohio River System and even the Mississippi network to settle the near-west and later the far west. Overland travel was so difficult in those times, this mode of as much travel by water as was possible was the preferred means of heading west.
The Castle is one of several large buildings of the 1850s (In this case, the site holds part of Fort Burd) still standing in western Pennsylvania, and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It was named, as was the trail, after the Shawnee Amerindian Chief who helped improve and mark the trail joining the Potomac River valley, through the Cumberland Gap through the barrier mountain ridges of the near impassible Allegheny range to the Ohio River drainage basin on the Monongahela River.
The only people to have lived in the house itself were the Bowman family. Three generations lived there, with the first generation revolving around Jacob Bowman, and the last bequeathing the home to history. Jacob Bowman and his wife started building the first part of the structure some time around 1789 with a trading post and one room above.
However, they soon found that they needed more room seeing that their family was growing,so they added on the main hallway. They had 9 children. When Jacob died in 1847, he left the house to his son Nelson. Nelson added the east wing of the house and the tower.
Nelson Bowman and his wife, Elizabeth, also upgraded the nursery from a colonial to a Victorian nursery. Although Nelson married late in his life he still had 6 children, though typical of the times, only two of them survived to adulthood. When Nelson died in 1892, he left the house to Charles Bowman who lived there until his death with his wife Lelia. After Lelia died in 1959, her wish was that the house become a museum. The house is now maintained as a museum by the Brownsville Historical Society.See also
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