Knowlton Biography, Chapter 46
Forty-six: The End of Knowlton
In the name of God, Amen. (so says the Form) I, Charles Knowlton of Ashfield in the County of Franklin, and Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Physician, being of sound and disposing mind and memory; being also about to leave home for an indefinite length of time, not knowing, of course, that I shall live to return; and having full confidence in the judgment and economy of my wife Tabitha and in her disposition to do well and justly by our children, do hereby give, bequeath and devise unto her the said Tabitha the use, income, and profit of all the real estate I now hold, the same lying in the towns of Ashfield and Cummington, also the use of all the personal property which I may leave her in possession of, consisting of all my household stuff, two cows, and divers notes and accounts…
It’s unclear exactly where Charles was going in the spring of 1847 when he wrote his will, or how long he was gone. Charles knew he wasn’t completely healthy and apparently expected to be away for a while, because he said “in case our daughter should marry in my absence,” Tabitha could give her up to two hundred fifty dollars. Augusta Comfort Knowlton was a few months shy of sixteen at the time—she didn’t marry until 1854. Charles also said Tabitha was “at liberty to assist both Stephen Owen Knowlton and Willis Knowlton, our sons, as they become of lawful age.” Stephen would be twenty-one about a year from the time Charles wrote the will, but Willis was only ten.
Women in the middle of the nineteenth century had severely limited legal rights, so Charles made it very clear that Tabitha would “continue to receive and manage” the income and profits from his estate “during my life and absence” and in case of his death. Charles also directed that if he died Tabitha would get three hundred fifty dollars in cash and the use of half his property “during her natural life, whether married or unmarried.” This stipulation was unusual, since most wills of the time only provided for the widow as long as she remained unmarried.
Charles split the other half of his assets between his remaining children, after making a special bequest of a hundred dollars to Melvina Lucy Tabor, his granddaughter. Her mother, Melvina, had died a little over a year earlier. Tragically, little Melvina didn’t see the end of 1847.
Although we don’t know how long Charles was away, we know he was home less than six months later. In November, 1847, Charles campaigned to be Ashfield’s representative in the Massachusetts Legislature. He came in second, with ninety-six votes. Charles was also home when his second son, Stephen Owen, died suddenly in the fall of 1849, a month before his twenty-first birthday. Charles had failed to realize his son was seriously ill. The grieving parents had a warning carved on Stephen’s gravestone: “Reader, If your friend breathes too frequently, however mild his other symptoms, rest not easy under the fallacious idea that it is nothing but a cold.”
Throughout his life, Charles was aware he had a weak heart. He had complained about it when the judge sentenced him to hard labor in 1833, but the condition had probably begun in his youth. Charles had not only taken dangerous drugs for three years as a young man, he had then let his father-in-law hook him up to Stuart’s “electerizing machine.” And then there were all the bodies Charles had worked on throughout his career, living and dead, without any type of protection. Being a doctor was a dangerous profession, in an age when even hand-washing was a radical innovation.
In the early 1840s, as he traveled around Western Massachusetts on his daily rounds, Charles would occasionally have attacks of angina or heart palpitations. Stephen Tabor later wrote that his father-in-law “had been troubled with such disturbances of the heart as often to oblige him to get out of his carriage and lay by the roadside till he was somewhat recovered of them.” The attacks stopped after a couple of years, and Charles regained the optimism that “I may yet live forty years and do many notable things.”
In late February, 1850, Charles visited his father and his brother in Templeton. He spent Tuesday night and part of Wednesday, February twentieth, with them, and then walked about a mile to the home of Tabitha’s sister Lucy Stuart Simonds in Winchendon. Although Charles had been suffering from what he thought was dyspepsia for a couple of weeks, he didn’t suspect any serious disease. When he reached the Simonds house, Charles announced that he was a little tired, but that his health was better than it had been in quite a while. Charles had dinner with the family, and then “sat up, conversing cheerfully, till 10 o’clock in the evening, when he retired to bed.” About midnight, his sister-in-law heard a noise in Charles’s room. She got up to investigate, and found Charles “partly rolled over on his face, and dead.”
Charles Knowlton died about six months before his fiftieth birthday. His family was shocked, and Tabitha had a line of poetry carved on Charles’s gravestone: “Death loves a shining mark, a signal blow.” The verse was from English poet Edward Young’s Night Thoughts. The full passage reads, “Death loves a shining mark, a signal blow;/ A blow, which, while it executes, alarms;/ And startles thousands with a single fall.” Luckily, although his death was unexpected, Knowlton’s affairs were in good order. Charles owned the family house, his office, and a four-acre lot in Ashfield, and the three parcels were worth twenty-five hundred dollars. He had two horses and two colts, a cow, a pig, and fifteen chickens. Because he traveled throughout Western Massachusetts in all kinds of weather, Charles owned a variety of carriages, sleighs, and a covered wagon. And he had an extensive library, and all the tools of his profession.
The largest part of Knowlton’s estate, though, was his collection of promissory notes. Charles was owed money by thirty-five families in Ashfield. In two cases, the amounts were over a thousand dollars, suggesting a long-term loan or investment. Several more notes ranged from one hundred to six hundred dollars. The rest of the debts were from two dollars eleven cents to eighty-three twenty-five, and were probably the balances owed to Charles by regular patients. When Charles’s executors collected on these notes, the estate he left for Tabitha and their children totaled to a very comfortable seventy-three hundred dollars.
Knowlton’s assets were inventoried and valued, and then many were distributed to family members and the rest sold to neighbors in an estate sale. Charles Lorenzo Knowlton and Stephen Tabor split Charles’s medical library and freethought collection between them. Charles’s library was valued at one hundred twenty-nine dollars, and included unusual titles such as Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Robert Chambers’s theory of evolution, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation.
Tabitha kept most of the household furnishings and the family’s “pianoforte” and music. Foster R. King, who ran a cooperative store in Ashfield, bought three old wagon wheels, Charles’s copy of Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary, and the “old electerizing machine,” for which he paid twenty-five cents.
Charles Knowlton was remembered in the pages of the Boston Medical & Surgical Journal as one of the “first physicians of Western Massachusetts.” He was known throughout Franklin County, and “had also extensively practiced in neighboring counties.”
In his profession he was most thoroughly versed, and notwithstanding his extensive ride, he was a close and ardent student. His desire for medical improvement was great, and after a long day’s work, many is the time that his office lamp was burning when the other inhabitants of the village were asleep, and he was investigating some intricate case, and searching to find means to baffle and subdue some formidable disease…In spite of his known and avowed infidelity on the subject of religion, these qualities secured him a run of business which no physician in Franklin County, probably, ever exceeded.
Knowlton’s son-in-law, Stephen Tabor, remembered Charles as an “odd” man, but said, “under his blunt exterior he carried a kind heart.” Charles was “not fond of disputation,” Tabor said, and never introduced controversy if it wasn’t forced on him. But his “adherence to truth was rigid and inflexible,” and Charles “had that moral courage which prevented him from ever shrinking from the expression of whatever sentiment he believed to be true.”
Tabor moved west to Independence, Iowa, shortly after Knowlton’s death, and became a judge and Auditor of the U. S. Treasury. Charles Lorenzo Knowlton took over his father’s medical practice in Ashfield, and later practiced in Northampton, Massachusetts. Tabitha raised the two younger children, Augusta and Willis, in Ashfield. She remained there the rest of her life, and died at age 78, in 1882.