Talk:Robert L. Owen Sr.

more work needed
The relationships between Owen and both Mahone and Union forces are less clear than I've written in the text. When researching on ancestry.com, his death record seemed to come up in a Washington DC database which should have been available according to the library's subscription, but was unable to be viewed, only purchased (which I did not do). A librarian had seen such before and said items kept getting removed from the library-edition database and put on the pay-as-you-go plan. When I finally located his wife's book at a library with sufficient Ebsco subscription (tho it was published in 1907, its unavailable on archive.com and google books), she says he died in Norfolk, and also explained his purchase of a farm there. Norfolk was the stronghold both of Gilbert Walker (a Unionist and Republican who became Virginia's first governor after Reconstruction) and the preferred port linkage of Mahone's railroad (which acquired Owen's Lynchburg RR).

Narcissa according to her biographer is an unreliable witness, and by the time she published her memoirs (IMHO quite probably to assist their son politically), railroad consolidation was badly thought of, and Mahone had been cursed by white Virginians for decades for being willing to work with blacks and Republicans. Unfortunately, the book about race relations in that era in Lynchburg (by Steven Trott I believe, and published by a university press in 1997) was no longer available on Ebsco.

I have no idea when or if I can get to the Library of Congress to get it, or check Washington and/or Norfolk newspaper archives, much less photograph the picture of this Owen in Narcissa's book.Jweaver28 (talk) 16:18, 28 January 2017 (UTC)