Originally called Westfield Township, this area was purchased in 1798 by Samuel Fowler from the Connecticut Land Company for $12,903.23 while he was living in Westfield, Massachusetts. His brother Abner arrived the following year to survey the land and divide it into smaller plots for settlers. A Revolutionary War veteran, Abner was the first to arrive here and also the first recorded death in 1806, the same year his son Abner Fowler II married Fowler’s first school teacher, Ester Jennings. In 1817, Samuel Fowler gave five acres at Fowler Center to be used as a park or common, with the condition that no permanent building ever be erected on it, and around that time the township was renamed Fowler to honor the founding family. Agriculture was and remains the main occupation in the area. In the Fowler Historic District, the house on the northeast corner of the intersection of State Routes 305 and 193 was built as a hotel in the late 1840s by A.J. Smith. On the southeast corner stands the 1852 brick home built by David Butts as a farmhouse, now used for two local government offices and the township museum. The 1850 one-room town hall stands on the southwest corner, and north of it is a private home that was once an early drug store. The post office occupies a former buggy repair shop, and north of that is the 1864 general store, still in operation, built by Darius Baldwin, who also built the large house on the northwest corner, originally used as a hotel in 1865. A veterans memorial on the northwest corner includes named crosses representing every war-related fatality from Fowler since the War of 1812.