Thomas Dowling was born on 25 September 1851 at near the Swift Creek Cemetery, White Springs, Hamilton County, Florida.1 He married Laura Ann Weeks on 14 May 1876 at Clay County, Florida.1 Thomas Dowling died on 11 June 1911 at Lake City, Columbia County, Florida, at age 59.1 He was buried after 11 June 1911 at Live Oak City Cemetery, Live Oak, Suwannee County, Florida.1
He and Laura Ann Weeks WILLIAM HAMPTON'S TENTH CHILD was born to Mahaley Ogden Dowling on September 25, 1851, near the Swift Creek Cemetery in which two older brothers had been buried. His name was THOMAS. At the age of twenty-four, in Clay County, Florida, he became a bridegroom; Laura Ann Weeks was the bride. This marriage was May 14, 1876; its children are shown on Chart 532.

As late as 1880 THOMAS was just a wheelwright, living in Baldwin, Florida. But "he moved to Live Oak in 1890 bringing capital and workmen with his new sawmill and started a period of expansion and development" according to the recent booklet "Suwannee County Centennial". (There is also an excellent picture of him in it.) The sawmills he subsequently operated are known to have cut millions of feet of virgin longleaf pine. Seven years after his arrival THOMAS offered fellow residents the novelty of water through a pipe! . . . With only six bathtubs in town three years later it is a certainty that Mr. Dowling did not make his half-million dollar fortune out of his later sale of this utility!

Such enterprises as THOMAS'S fifteen-mile-long "Dowling Lumber Road" (now the L. O. P. & G. Railroad) helped triple Suwannee's population in a decade! He was also organizer of the Dowling Export and Lumber Company, the Tampa-Havana Lumber Company, and the Gulf Pine Company of Pasco County. THOMAS contributed largely to the erection of Live Oak's first Advent Christian Church by providing the land in 1900, shortly after a term on the town council. Death took him June 11, 1911; he and Laura are buried in the City Cemetery in Live Oak. (She died October 3, 1918. She and her parents, Elender Wilson and James Albert Weeks, were born in Florida. Laura's birthdate was March 6, 1853