General Henry Knox

General Henry Knox -
Creator of the Pluckemin Artillery Cantonment and
Founder of America's First Military Academy

General Henry Knox seemed to have been everywhere during the revolution. From the Boston Massacre to the British surrender at Yorktown, he's best known for his heroic winter trek to Boston with artillery from Ticonderoga. General Knox served with distinction in every major engagement of the war and thus later became Secretary of War under President George Washington.

It was in Pluckemin where then Continental Army Brigadier General and Chief of the Artillery Henry Knox created one of his greatest accomplishments with the formation of his first officer training and military academy for the Continental Army, called "The Academy".

While residing at the Jacobus Vanderveer house in Pluckemin (now a hamlet of Bedminster, New Jersey), the 28 year old General Knox spent the winter of 1778 thru the summer of 1779 leading over 1,000 soldiers in desperate need of formal military training. Morale was low and supplies were scarce.

Artillerymen were the elite troops of this era. The need for a knowledge of mathematics and engineering made them a cut above other army branches. The uniform reflected the distinction; it was virtually the same in any army world wide.

General Knox established what was know as the Pluckemin Artillery Cantonment (pronounced can-tone-mint), or simply the Park of the Artillery. It was here where the first American artillery training facility was created and noted simply as "The Academy" (See background), the predecessor to his later creation; The United States Military Academy at West Point, New York.

As part of the cantonment, the Academy became the bridge to improve the army's capabilities to lead and later dominate Yorktown and eventually end the revolutionary war.

Knox Family

While at Pluckemin, Henry Knox was 28, and was married to his wife Lucy Knox. They had one daughter Lucy at the time and lost their newborn daughter Julia while residing in Pluckemin (see Julia Knox story). At the time, Henry Knox was a Brigadier General (1776-1781) receiving a salary of approximately $3 per day for his military leadership services.

The Knox's Personal Loss in Pluckemin

General and Mrs. Knox tasted sorrow as well as pleasure, while living in the Van der Veer house. About twenty-five feet west of the Reformed Dutch church a tombstone is still to be seen, upon which is the following inscription:

"Under this stone are deposited the remains of Julia Knox, an infant who died the second of July, 1779. She was the second daughter of Henry and Lucy Knox, of Boston, in New England."

Mrs. Knox was, in all. the mother of ten children. Seven of them may be said to have been laid on the altar of her country, as that number died in infancy ; due without doubt to the excitements and severe bodily and mental strain incidental to campaigning. Bedminster traditions preserve an unhappy story connected with the death of this Revolutionary babe. Notwithstanding that Knox was in the township defending the homeland and liberties of the people, the consistory of the Reformed Dutch church refused to allow this little one to be buried in the churchyard. In their ignorance and superstition the Dutch fathers considered the fact of Knox being a member of the Congregational church of New England sufficient to warrant their refusing his child a sepulcher.

The general's host, old Jacobus Van der Veer — himself one of the consistory — was very indignant at the stand taken by his co- trustees. He, poor man, had suffered from the same bigotry. A few years before, on the death of an insane daughter a burial place had been denied his child ; this, too, in the face of the fact that the church-grounds had been a gift to the congregation from THE STORY OF AN OLD FARM. Loading...Loading... STEUBEN AS A DISCIPLINARIAN. 471 the man they were treating so harshly. The worthy elders reasoned that the girl's infirmities would endanger her salvation in the next world, consequently her body in this one could not be permitted to crumble into dust among those of the elect. Van der Veer buried his daughter in a field just beyond the line of the " God's acre." He is said to have taken Knox by the hand, and leading him to the lonely grave outside the fence, ejaculated with a choking voice, " General, this is my ground, bury your child here." The prejudice of the church people seems to have lessened, as a few years later the fence was moved, so that the burial-ground now includes the once excluded graves of the children of honest old Jacobus Van der Veer and the brave Evolutionary soldier.

From This Old Farm (Book) The Story of an Old Farm or Life in New Jersey in the Eighteenth Century by Andrew Mellick, Jr. - The Unionist Gazette, Somerville, NJ (1889) pgs. 469 - 470

Above left:
General Knox wears the newly cast Society of the Cincinnati medal brought from Paris by Major Pierre L'Enfant. Knox formed the society as a fraternity of American and French officers of the American Revolution. Knox portrait painted by Charles Wilson Peale circa 1784 when General Knox was 33 years old. He was 28 when he resided in Pluckemin. Note epaulettes (ornamental shoulder pieces noting rank) displaying his two stars as a Major General, along with various colors to their ribband (sash) and colored cockades in their hats. If General Knox were in today's Army, his equilivant rank would have been that of a four star General, which didn't exist at the time.

Charles Willson Peale painted Knox's museum portrait in the spring of 1784, when Knox came to Philadelphia for the first national meeting of the Society of the Cincinnati. At that time, Major Pierre L'Enfant brought the Society members their newly cast medals from Paris. Knox wears his in the museum portrait [on the blue and white ribbon in the upper left buttonhole.]

Although the Knox portrait appears on Peale's October 13, 1784 Freeman's Journal and Philadelphia Daily Advertiser announcement of the museum's contents, the painting has a format different from that of other contemporary Peale Museum examples.

Before the early 19th century, Peale left the museum portraits unpainted at the corners because those areas were covered by oval spandrels within each frame. As a result, the Cincinnati medal on Knox's left lapel was obscured when the portrait hung in the museum.

Another inconsistency in the Knox portrait is that the right epaulette has been substantively over painted, as if to reflect the addition of a star to it. But Knox had received his promotion to Major General after Yorktown, in the spring of 1782, and would have used two stars on each epaulette from that time onward.

Painting Ownership History:
Listed in the 1795 Peale Museum catalog. Purchased by the City of Philadelphia in 1854 at Baltimore's Peale Museum sale.

Above right:
Placards that will soon be on display at the Vanderveer/Knox Museum in Bedminster New Jersey, depicting General Knox's involvement during the Winter 1778/1779 encampment at Pluckemin.

General Knox is also remembered as the first commander of West Point and as the namesake of Fort Knox, the United States Army post and US Department of the Treasury's gold bullion depository in Fort Knox, Kentucky. He was the Secretary of War and presided over the United States Army and Navy.

Before the war, Knox was a bookseller in Boston, but was involved with the cause for American independence from the beginning of the Revolution in 1775. It was then that Knox met Washington who admired Knox's knowledge of artillery, and came to rely on him in all matters regarding that field of the military.

Biography Snapshot

Henry Knox was an ordinary man that rose to face extraordinary circumstances. He was born into poverty in Boston on July 25, 1750. He left school at a young age to apprentice to a bookbinder, helping to support his widowed mother and younger brother William. He eventually worked his way to opening his own bookshop in Boston at the age of 21 without suspecting the important role that he would play in the birth of our nation.

His keen interest in military strategy led him to do a lot of reading on the subject, and when he joined the local militia, his talent was noticed. In 1774, as the situation between Great Britain and the American colonies was heating up, General George Washington inspected a rampart designed by Knox and was instantly taken with the young man's abilities. Knox soon after became Washington's Chief of Artillery, and earned a place in history in 1776 by carting sixty tons of captured cannon from Fort Ticonderoga in New York to Boston in the dead of winter which were used to drive the British from Boston Harbor.

Lucy and Henry were married in June of 1774. Henry escaped Boston to join the Revolutionary forces late the following spring. Despite their vastly different backgrounds, Lucy and Henry had a happy marriage, marred only by the fact that ten of their thirteen children did not live to adulthood.

After ten years serving his country as Secretary of War, Henry Knox began to long for the life of a gentleman farmer, like the lives his friends George Washington and Thomas Jefferson who were living on their country estates. Fortunately for Henry, Lucy had inherited a vast tract of land in the District of Maine through her mother, the daughter of British Brigadier General Samuel Waldo. Her family, being staunch Tories, had forfeited their lands during the Revolutionary War, leaving Lucy the only Flucker that could rightfully take possession.

In 1795, newly retired from public life, Knox bade farewell to Philadelphia and moved his family to Montpelier in Thomaston, Maine, to dedicate his all to the development of the District of Maine. A beautiful museum honors him in Montpelier (Click Here) .

In 1789, five years before his retirement, Knox commissioned Jonathan Stone to make a map of his holdings. In 1792 he commissioned a survey of its natural resources. The Waldo Patent was made up of 576,000 stretching from Waldoboro to Belfast.

(Bio Courtesy - Maine Memory Network)

Additional information:

Chicken Takes Down a War Hero

Henry Knox's Profile General Knox is also on Linked In. Read about his career. - Click Here		Did General Knox meet his death from a chicken bone? Click Here to find out.

Knox Almost Displaced as Artillery Commander

Just as the artillery corps were becoming an integral part of General Washington's Continental Army, it was not the British that almost took out Artillery Commander Henry Knox - it was the French and the new Continental Congress that almost took him down. If it wasn't for the majority of American Generals Greene, Arnold, and others who threatened to resign if the frenchman replaced Knox, the event was all but a done deal.

Knox was almost displaced of his position in charge of artillery by a Frenchman named Du Condray, secured by Silas Deane, the American Minister to France. Du Condray interviewed with Washington and then headed to lay his credentials before Congress.

Washington wrote Congress on behalf of Knox on May 31, 1777: "General Knox, who has deservedly acquired the character of one of the most valuable officers in the service, and who combating almost innumerable difficulties in the department he fills has placed the artillery upon a footing that does him the greatest honor; he, I am persuaded, would consider himself injured by an appointment superseding his command, and would not think himself at liberty to continue in the service. Should such an event take place in the present state of things, there would be too much reason to apprehend a train of ills, such as might confuse and unhinge this important department."

Generals Green and Sullivan supported Washington, and Du Condray was permitted to join the troops under Washington as a volunteer. He was to prove his ability as an engineer, but not given any preference over Knox. Unfortunately, in the late summer of 1777, Du Condray was riding a spirited horse in search of Washington in Chester County, Pennsylvania. As he was about to enter a flat bottom boat to cross the Schuylkill River, he lost control of the horse, the horse and rider plunged into the river and Du Condray was drowned.

Read the entire essay:
(Click the Full Screen button above the presentation for a larger view.)

Abridged from the article by Charles William Heathcote, Ph.D., The Picket Post, Valley Forge Historical Society; July 1956. Courtesy National Center for the American Revolution/Valley Forge Historical Society

General Henry Knox Essay

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Learn more about the Pluckemin Artillery Encampment and what it meant to the Revolutionary War...Click Here

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