Henry Knox has been dead for more than two centuries, but he still casts a long, broad shadow over midcoast Maine, a region where the counties and older towns are named for him, his grandfather-in-law, or their business associates, and the backcountry hamlets for the ideals of the settlers who rose up against his rule.

[For the rest of this story, see the August 2008 issue of Down East.]

Military hero of the Revolution, confidante to George Washington, and inheritor of one of the greatest landed estates of colonial New England, Knox is the only Founding Father with substantial ties to Maine. His truly heroic exploits during the American Revolution have received renewed attention with the release of David McCullough’s 1776 and the television movie adaptation of John Adams, which celebrate Knox’s vital role in breaking the siege of Boston and the British lines at the Battle of Yorktown.

“Knox is finally gaining some traction,” says Renny Stackpole, of Thomaston, longtime director and board chair of Montpelier, the General Henry Knox Museum in Thomaston, the town where Knox spent the last decade of his life. “People are beginning to recognize his name and so are getting interested in his legacy.”

So, too, is the museum that bears his name. Housed in a 1930 replica of Knox’s Thomaston mansion, the Montpelier museum is emerging from decades of privation. Twenty years ago it was an all-volunteer organization unable to heat its 12,0000-square-foot building. Its walls were literally mouldering every spring. Now it has a full-time staff of four, a nascent center for the education of teachers, and enough money to begin thinking about something other than keeping the roofs from falling in on an impressive collection of period furnishings and Knox family possessions. “We’re just getting our feet under ourselves, and we’re seeing enormous growth in many directions,” says Ellen Dyer, the museum’s director of education, who hopes it will one day be a peer of Mount Vernon and Monticello, the house museums of Washington and Thomas Jefferson. “We want to be an institution that people will look to for answers.”

But doing that requires fielding some unpleasant questions about Knox’s later life, when many in New England regarded the portly general not as a hero of the Revolution but as one of the villains who sought to subvert its democratic promise. Nowhere was Knox as controversial as in Maine, where he tried to build a baronial fortune through corruption, cronyism, and the monopolistic control of trade and industry.

“Knox had a fairly narrow vision of what the American Revolution should accomplish: essentially independence from Britain with a society that would be of the same sort as they had before the Revolution,” says Windham native Alan Taylor, a Pulitzer-prize winning historian at the University of California-Davis and author of Liberty Men and Great Proprietors. “He wanted to be one of those great men, the governing elite, the natural aristocracy of the new republic. And to do that, he needed lots of land.”

In search of land, Knox turned his eyes on Maine, where his wife had inherited the kernel of a once-vast estate. Knox was self-made, a Boston-born bookseller who read his way to expertise with artillery and married into one of the most powerful families in New England. His wife, Lucy Flucker, was the granddaughter of Samuel Waldo, an early eighteenth-century merchant and slave trader who owned 575,000 acres of coastal Maine encompassing today’s Knox and Waldo counties. Lucy had inherited 20 percent of this vast estate, but another 40 percent was owned by Massachusetts, which had confiscated it from heirs who had remained loyal to Britain. Most people assumed the confiscated land would be distributed to rank-and-file Revolutionary War veterans in lieu of their unpaid wages, just as loyalist estates in Vermont had.
Knox had other plans.

The three-hundred-pound general used his contacts to ensure all the confiscated lands were to be transferred to a single war veteran: himself. To do this, he got himself appointed as the government agent responsible for disposing of the property, then auctioned it to a silent partner for three thousand dollars, a ninth of its market value. Sixteen months later — in 1792 — the partner passed it on to Knox for the same bargain basement price. The following year he purchased the remaining 40 percent of the Waldo lands from Lucy’s siblings for $25,000. By this time he’d also acquired another three and a half million acres, including most of what is now Washington, eastern Hancock, and northern Somerset counties. At their apogee, Knox’s land holdings in Maine were larger than the state of Connecticut.

“He took advantage of his inside position in a way that certainly wouldn’t look good today and was controversial at the time, especially among those people who were already living on these lands,” says Taylor.

In Thomaston, fellow land baron Robert Hallowell Gardiner remarked, Knox set himself up “in the style of an English nobleman.” The original Montpelier, constructed in 1794, was said to be “a much larger house in every respect than any other private house from Philadelphia to Passamaquoddy.” Located near the banks of the St. George River, the nineteen-room mansion featured French furniture, a 1,600-volume library, and marble-faced fireplaces. The entire town was invited to the Knox’s housewarming party, held on July 4, 1795, which included an ox on a spit, a piano recital, and five hundred awestruck guests. “Although hardly worth repeating, the house was so much larger than anything [the Mainers] had previously seen that everything was a subject of wonder,” Knox’s daughter recalled. “The day . . . will long be remembered in the annals of Thomaston.”

Borrowing on expected revenues from selling land to settlers, Knox made massive investments in the town: orchards, wharves, boatyards, sawmills, gristmills, a brick factory, and a quarry to harvest limestone, a task still carried on today by the Dragon Cement Company. “My relation to the settlers [is] as a father and guardian . . . close friend and protector,” Knox wrote. Anyone who said otherwise, the settlers should “suspect . . . to be their enemy.”

“Knox had a top-down and self-interested vision of what the world should look like and how society should function,” says Terry Bouton, a historian specializing on the period at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “He was surprised that in the aftermath of the Revolution, ordinary people refused to bow down to him and doff their hats. They didn’t want the society that Knox did, one where a few people own the land, and Knox, who owned the gristmills and sawmills, would live off their labor and be deferred to both socially and politically.”

Indeed, by the time he moved to Maine in 1795, Knox was already a controversial figure. Twelve years earlier he organized the Society of the Cincinnati, a hereditary association of army officers who wore elaborate badges modeled on those of European noble orders and passed their membership on to firstborn sons. Samuel Adams predicted these sons would “assume more than the mere pageantry of nobility,” while John Adams called the society “the deepest piece of cunning yet attempted” and “the first step taken to deface the beauty of our temple of liberty.” Army veteran Aedanus Burke, congressman from South Carolina, printed a widely read pamphlet in which he warned: “This order is planted [with] a fiery hot ambition and thirst for power, and its branches will end in tyranny.” A legislative investigation in Massachusetts concluded the society was a danger to the democratic republic.

While the threat was overblown, the society was certainly powerful. Its membership included many of the new nation’s most influential figures, including Alexander Hamilton, James Monroe, John Paul Jones, and Washington, who wore his Cincinnati badge at his presidential inauguration. The governor of the Midwestern frontier territories was a member and had an Ohio city renamed in its honor, just as Knox was able to name Maine communities for fellow Cincinnati: Warren, Lincolnville, Monroe, Jackson, Brooks, and Steuben.

Beyond self-aggrandizement, the society’s primary concern was to secure pensions for officers like themselves. Rank-and-file veterans were outraged by the prospect of paying higher taxes to line the pockets of their superiors while they themselves remained unpaid for their wartime service. In 1786, veterans in western Massachusetts, angered over these and other regressive taxes, took up arms against Boston authorities. As the nation’s first Secretary of War, Henry Knox oversaw the suppression of the revolt, an action that did not win many friends among Maine’s backcountry settlers.

“These were protests that were very reminiscent of what had happened in the American Revolution but now they were directed at the government of Massachusetts,” notes Markus Hünemörder, an expert on the Cincinnati at the University of Munich. “There was a class element to it: the backcountry towns supported the rebellion while the eastern establishment and many of the Cincinnati were engaged in putting it down.”

In Maine, Knox faced another rebellion. As the country settled into a postwar depression, tens of thousands of poor settlers were streaming into Maine in search of unoccupied land. Knowing that the Waldo heirs had been loyalists, the settlers assumed backcountry lands were free for the taking, and the army veterans among them felt it was their due. “Are we not as much the owners of this soul by conquest as [settlers in] Vermont?” asked Samuel Ely, a radical Northport preacher who would spearhead resistance to Knox. “Why should the people yield up their property to the arbitrary disposal of any man on Earth?”

To realize a return on his massive investments, Knox needed the settlers to pay him for the land they occupied, but many of them refused to do so. His surveyors were assaulted, and his agent’s property burned. A coffin was left on the doorstep of Knox’s son-in-law, Samuel Thatcher, while settlers dressed as Indians [see page 88] kept the town fathers of Belfast in constant fear of attack. In 1796, Ely led a meeting of three hundred Lincolnville settlers who collected arms and ammunition in preparation for a raid on Montpelier, which they threatened to burn to the ground. “I am not apprehensive that they have any intention to take the life of a person,” one of Knox’s agents wrote him, “but I very much doubt whether they would have the politeness to wake you or myself previous to their firing of the house.”

“These were people who felt that their legal title was the labor they had invested in making farms out of what they considered wilderness lands,” says Taylor, noting that settlers were also rebelling against Gardiner and other land barons. “They saw what they were doing as legal and just, while Knox saw them as anarchists and thieves.”

While Knox had the courts and government on his side, many Mainers sided with the backcountry settlers. Members of Thomas Jefferson’s new political party rallied behind their cause, denouncing Knox and his ilk as “supercilious lordlings.” In 1805, Thomaston-area voters turned Knox out of his legislative seat in favor of the Jeffersonian candidate, a local blacksmith. Two years later the Jeffersonian Party — populist and egalitarian — swept Maine’s elections, setting the stage for Maine’s eventual separation from Massachusetts. A humbled Knox ultimately sold titles to the settlers for much less than he had originally intended. The latter would name their backcountry towns not for their masters, but for their ideals: Liberty, Hope, Unity, and Freedom.

Meanwhile, Knox’s empire was drowning in a sea of debt. He was forced to hand over his 3.5 million acres in eastern and central Maine to his banker, William Bingham. He surrendered unsold Waldo lands to other creditors. When he died in 1806 (he had swallowed a chicken bone), his debts exceeded the value of his estate.

Knox’s heirs were unable to right matters. The eldest son, Henry Jackson Knox, was a lout and a drunkard and was deemed unfit for naval service by the U.S. Senate. Daughter Caroline was married to another wastrel, James Swan, Jr., who sat about Montpelier with little inclination to do anything. Caroline was reduced to dividing the mansion’s lawns and orchards into house lots and selling them to Thomaston’s more industrious residents.

By the time Nathaniel Hawthorne visited in the summer of 1837, Montpelier was in decay. “Now there is little left but the ruinous mansion and the ground immediately around it,” he wrote. “The house and its vicinity and the whole tract covered by Knox’s patent may be taken as an illustration of what must be the result of American schemes of aristocracy . . . Now the house is all in decay while, within a stone’s throw of it, is a street of neat, smart, white edifices of one and two stories occupied chiefly by thriving mechanics.”

The visit made an enormous impression on Hawthorne, inspiring his novel The House of the Seven Gables, in which the impoverished heirs of a ruthless colonel suffer on an estate cursed by fraudulent dealings and the miscarriage of justice. Knox, the hero of a democratic revolution, provided the model for one of American literature’s most craven despots, the cruel and grasping Colonel Pyncheon.

In 1855, Knox’s heirs sold the remaining property to a local shipbuilder and, in 1871, Montpelier was torn down to make way for the railroad station. Today, all that remains of the original property is the farmhouse that shelters the Thomaston Historical Society, perched on the edge of the tracks.

The present Montpelier is an early twentieth-century structure conceived as a shrine to Knox’s memory. The brainchild of a now-defunct chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, it was explicitly intended “to honor a hero” and serve as “a new shrine” to join “the honorable and lengthening list of national patriotic memorials.” With the help of Saturday Evening Post founder Cyrus Curtis (a Maine native), patriotic Thomaston residents managed to raise $110,000 to build the fireproof replica on the edge of town. Knox’s great-grandson, Henry Thatcher Fowler, donated many of the late general’s possessions.

The families that created the museum are no longer on the scene, but their celebratory attitude toward Knox remains. Take a tour of Montpelier and, more likely than not, you’ll hear nothing of his conflicts with Maine’s settlers. There’s an entire room devoted to the Society of the Cincinnati (which supports the museum), but few words regarding the controversy it inspired. Knox was simply a delightful man, a war hero who built his wife a wonderful home, and selflessly labored to develop this part of Maine.

“Each tour guide is given a decent biography of Knox, but it’s up to them to talk about what they are passionate about,” explains Dyer. “Most of the guides we have focus on the positive aspects because they are here more for the love of the man than for a love of the history of the period in general.

“They’ve actually toned down the hero worship a little bit,” she adds. “When I first came here [in 2003] the controversial stuff didn’t appear anywhere in the materials the guides were given.” Changes will take time, she says, especially given the museum’s dependence on the volunteers and their enthusiasm.
Indeed, there are many in Thomaston who don’t want the general’s darker side exposed. “In Thomaston, Knox is a hero and a local industry and people are very reluctant to look at it another way,” says Stephanie Philbrick of the Maine Historical Society, who produced a segment on the settlers’ uprising for Maine Public Broadcasting Network’s history series Home: The Story of Maine. “The farther you get from Thomaston, the more feelings change.”

But Stackpole — a former director of the Penobscot Marine Museum whose brother and late father were also museum directors — says that at this stage in its evolution, Montpelier is focusing on attracting people to its doors.

“I don’t think everyone likes to listen to the negative all the time, so let’s accentuate the positive and minimize the negative to keep this thing alive,” says Stackpole, who volunteers at the museum in a convincing period costume made by his wife. “What one has to try to do is not to wow the audience with a lot of B.S., but to tell the story in its more romantic implications.”