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Florence M. Howe
Florence Adelbert Howe Margach Howe was born in 1877 in Meadville and died in 1961 in Ohio. Her girlhood home was at 482 Baldwin Street, Meadville.
Margach Family Home at 482 Baldwin Street, Meadville, PA
In 1901 she married Bertram Falwell Howe (born 1877 in Meadville, died 1942 in Titusville). They bought the 16-room house at 732 East Main Street, Titusville, in about 1930 and operated it as Howe’s Tourist Home. Florence sold the house in 1957.
Howe’s Tourist Home – 732 East Main Street, Titusville, PA 16335
Florence Howe was a graduate of the Arts and Design course at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. She painted china dinnerware and painted stereographic slides for Underwood & Underwood, Keystone View Company, and travel lecturer Burton Holmes. The Meadville Tribune-Republican published her letter about her extensive European tour that the newspaper sponsored. The Titusville Herald reported her talks to local women’s clubs about her paintings, often focusing on paintings of local scenes such as on the Allegheny College campus and local rivers. She sold more than 500 paintings according to a 1953 family document.
One of Florence Howe’s paintings. Collection of the Crawford County Historical Society. Gift of Sally Howe, 2021.
Florence’s paternal grandfather Alexander McWilliam Margach (died 1856) emigrated from Scotland. Her paternal grandmother Martha Weede Howe Margach (1820-1887), her father Frederick McWilliam Margach (1842-1934), and her mother Lelia Fay Wheeler Margach (1846-1927) are buried in Greendale Cemetery in Meadville. Elias Howe (1819-1867), inventor of the sewing machine, was Martha’s uncle. Florence and Bert are buried in Fairview Cemetery in Pleasantville.
One of Florence Howe’s paintings. Collection of the Crawford County Historical Society. Gift of Sally Howe, 2021.
Bert Howe’s ancestors emigrated from Northern Ireland around 1800 and lived in Crawford, Venango, and Warren counties. Bert’s uncle, Frederic Clemson Howe (1867-1940), author of 17 books and Commissioner of Immigration at Ellis Island (1914-1916), is buried in Greendale Cemetery.
Frederic C. Howe – Author, Reformer, and Commissioner of Immigration at Ellis Island 1914-1916.
Florence and Bert had two sons, Maurice Margach Howe (1903-1967) and Robert James Howe (1909-1990). In 2021, Robert’s daughter Sally Elizabeth Howe donated eight of her grandmother’s paintings, which had hung in her parents’ homes, to the Crawford County Historical Society where they will be permanently displayed in the county’s first countywide history museum.
Sally Elizabeth Howe
References
This article is a exerpt of the exhibit script written by Sally Elizabeth Howe to accompany eight paintings she donated by her grandmother, Florence M. Howe, to the Crawford County Historical Society.
About the Author
Sally Elizabeth Howe (born 1945) has generously sponsored this Arts and Culture section of the Crawford County Historical Society’s first countywide museum, to be opened to the public in 2026. She is a granddaughter of Florence Howe (1877-1961), eight of whose paintings she donated to the Historical Society.
Sally was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and raised in Euclid (a Cleveland suburb). Her father, Robert James Howe (1909-1990), was born in Meadville, graduated from Allegheny College, and had an MBA from Harvard Business School. He worked for Thompson Products (which eventually merged into Northrop Grumman) in Euclid from 1940 to 1968. Her mother, H. Elizabeth Ballow Howe (1918-2019), met her father when she became his secretary at Thompson Products. Her brother Timothy Robert Howe (1947-2007) was also an Allegheny College grad.
Sally decided to be a math major in 10th grade. She saw how her father benefited from his college and graduate study, and followed suit, though she could not have envisioned what turned out to be a wonderful career that started in the early years of the information age.
She has a BA, MA, and Ph.D. in math, and had a 37-year career with the Federal Government. The high point was 1992-2007 at the newly-established National Coordination Office for High Performance Computing and Communications (NCO/HPCC) (its name has since evolved). The program was authorized by the High Performance Computing Act (HPCA) of 1991, which called for the Federal Government to coordinated its computing, networking, and software research and development. The program began with eight large Federal science and technology agencies, and grew to 23 agencies in 2023. Sally was first writer then executive editor of annual reports to Congress required by the HPCA, later became NCO deputy director, and built an HPCC archive and wrote blog posts about the program before retiring in 2017.
As a child Sally and her family often visited her grandmother in her house at 732 East Main Street, Titusville. (The house was next to Burgess Park and across from Cyclops Steel Co.; the fire department razed it in 2018.) Her father inherited his mother’s paintings, which hung in her parents’ home. After her mother died, she decided to try to get the paintings back to where they came from, and contacted the Historical Society. She’s pleased to help share them with a wider audience, and to help support the Society’s efforts to draw attention to the significant but not widely known history of Crawford County and western Pennsylvania.
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