Joseph A. McDowell was born around 1854 in North Carolina. McDowell lived in Grey Eagle, now Black Mountain (Buncombe County), North Carolina, with his wife Louisa "Lula" McDowell (née Murphy). He wrote to governor Thomas J. Jarvis in 1879 about securing a position on the Western North Carolina Railroad. He is listed on the 1880 federal census as a camp guard living in Buncombe County. He died in Orlando, Florida, in 1930.