Our Baur family first appear in North America with the arrival of Moses Baur in Philadelphia on September 10, 1753 on the English ship Beulah, which sailed from Rotterdam. Based on research done by other Baur genealogists, it appears likely that the family resided in the Duchy of Württemberg prior to their emigration. Their emigration was part of a larger German movement that took place between 1682 and 1776 in response to religious persecution and political oppression in many German principalities at the time.

During this period, Pennsylvania was the most common destination point for these Germans due to William Penn's liberal views toward religion and his active promotion of such emigration as a way of populating his colony and providing a buffer between the English residents of Philadelphia and the native peoples being pushed back in the surrounding territory.

Moses arrived with his wife, Maria Catherina (née Schiemer), and two young sons, Michael and Albrecht. Moses had purchased land in Pennsylvania prior to his arrival, located about 50 miles northwest of Philadelphia in what is now Berks County. According to tax records from the period, in 1772 he purchased additional land along the Monocacy Creek not far from where it empties into the Schuykill River. The house he built on that land still stands today.

The English governmental authorities changed the spelling of the family surname from Baur (sometimes recorded as Bauer) to the phonetically equivalent English spelling of Bower in property and tax records, but the spelling Baur can be found in church records until Moses' death. Moses signed his name Baur in his last Will and Testament just weeks before his death in 1805. Barbara (Kloss) Bower, the wife of his third son, Moses, Jr., is the first known burial in our line under the spelling Bower, and it appears that their son, John, was the first to add the 's' to the end of the name, sometime between 1850 and 1860.

Over the next 250 years after Moses' arrival, our direct line of the Bowers family moved in stages from southeast Pennsylvania to central Pennsylvania (Moses, Jr.), southern Michigan (John and Samuel), northeast Iowa (John and Samuel), northern North Dakota (William), and back to northern Iowa (William and Loren). Later generations still living have spread out from there to Illinois, Colorado, and New Jersey.