Knowlton Biography, Chapter 14
Fourteen: Hawley
Having returned from my second course of lectures, I started off with a horse, an old sleigh, an old pair of farmer's saddle-bags, an electerizing machine, and ten dollars, only ten dollars, and no medicines, to seek my fortune…I went into Hawley, with my empty purse and saddle-bags, on the first of January, 1824; and there bought, at the first move, a small place (without paying a cent down for it), before I knew anything of the value of real estate in that town, and promised to give a fifth if not a quarter more for it than it could have been sold for to any other person.
Charles had high hopes of establishing a practice in Hawley. There was already a physician in town, but he had heard from several people that the other doctor was old, incompetent, and not well liked. Confident in his abilities even though he had no medicines, no medical library—not even a mortar and pestle, Charles set off westward.
As he reached the Connecticut River Valley after about twenty-five miles of travel, Charles caught up with a Yankee peddler walking on the road. Peddlers were young men, many of them from the Ashfield area, who traveled throughout New England and often much farther. They sold small goods out of baskets and trunks they carried on their backs. This peddler may have been on his way back to Ashfield, but he still had a cloth cap in his trunk. The cold weather and the young peddler’s fast talking were a powerful combination, and Charles soon bought the cap for four dollars. He found out quickly enough that he had paid three dollars too much.
Charles arrived in Greenfield at the end of a long day, after covering thirty-five miles of hilly countryside along a route that is now U.S. Route 2, the Mohawk Trail. Occupying high ground to the west of the Connecticut River where it meets the Deerfield River, Greenfield was the Franklin County seat and the commercial center of northwestern Massachusetts. Charles found cheap lodging for himself and his horse, but after overpaying for his new hat he didn’t have enough money for breakfast the next morning. Charles set off into the steep western hills on an empty stomach and climbed twenty miles into the foothills of the Berkshires before finally reaching Hawley and a hot meal at the end of the second day.
Remembering this move many years later, Knowlton admitted that he’d settled in Hawley, “a miserable location for me, because I had no means to enable me to look further.” Charles cautioned young doctors to be very suspicious of people who eagerly recommended places they should set up practice. “They may have some unjust pique against the physician or physicians already residing there; and on making inquiries of some other person the young physician may receive a very different opinion,” Charles observed, recalling his own experience.
Charles arrived in Hawley on New Years Day, 1824, with no money in his pockets. With the help of the enthusiastic townspeople who had invited him, Charles bought a small cottage on credit. Although he soon realized he’d paid too much for the house, Charles also managed to get board for himself and stabling and hay for his horse, on credit. An old history of Hawley recalled that “an instant rivalry sprang up between Dr. Knowlton and Dr. Moses Smith. Each doctor had strong partisans,” the story continued, “and quite a number of families named their children after their favorite physician.” Charles didn’t yet understand that needing a doctor wasn’t the same as being able to support one. The Hawley townspeople most excited about getting a new physician were the ones least able to pay the existing one.
Knowlton’s cottage was in a little roadside hamlet a few miles from the main village of Hawley. There were a handful of houses, a blacksmith shop, two hotels, a couple of stores and a church. In 1905 an old man who remembered the hamlet admitted, “It is a howling wilderness today—not a house in sight.” Like so many villages in the New England hills, it has disappeared leaving nothing but cellar-holes filled with vines and small trees. But in the winter of 1824, Charles thought enough of his prospects in Hawley that after a month alone preparing the place, he drove down to Templeton and brought Tabitha back to their new home. Although he only earned twenty dollars in his first four months of practice, Charles and Tabitha finally had their own place. And just in time, since Tabitha was expecting their first child in the spring.