Eleazer Knowles

Biographical sketch based on excerpts available from: History of Greene County, New York, J. B. Beers & Co., 1884, 482 pages

Benjamin Spees, Edward Lake and Eleazer KNOWLES were among the first settlers in the vicinity of Greenville Village (in Greene Co., New York). In the summer of 1781, these three men left their homes in Woodbury, New Haven County, Connecticut on horseback, crossed the river at Hudson, and made their perilous way through the forest to where the village of Greenville now stands (in 1884). Locating their lands, they returned to their homes in Woodbury. The following winter, they bade adieu to their loved ones, and came with their families and the few others who were induced to join them, and began preparations for homes in Greenville region, which at time was the far West.

These men were the sons of hardy New Englanders, and they had been taught the economy and industry which had enabled their fathers to thrive among the rocks and hills of their native country. In the exercise of that independent, self-reliant spirit, inherited from their sires, they had left their paternal homes to make a settlement in the untamed wilderness.

Eleazer KNOWLES built his cabin on the east brow of Budd's Hill, where he purchased 600 acres of land. A portion of this land still remains in the possession of the Knowles family (in 1884). Benjamin Spees purchased an equal quantity to the north of the village, a portion of that now (in 1884) owned by Samuel Spees, and moved into a log cabin a short distance to the west of the old residence of Robert F. Spees.

Next to Father Hotchkin, there was no man in this new settlement whose influence was greater and more beneficent than Eleazer KNOWLES, Esq. Of Puritan stock, his ancestors emigrated from the south of England in 1640, and settled in Southbury (New Haven County), Connecticut, where Eleazer was born in 1737. From there he removed to Greenville with his four sons, Ell, Liberty, John and Eleazer, Jr. (Eazer).

Esquire Knowles was a man of great force of character, remarkably venerable in his personal appearance, "associated in my mine," writes a correspondent who well remembers him, "with prophets and apostles, and the veneration with which I looked on him was deepened by the text of his funeral sermon: 'Mark the perfect man and behold the upright, for the end of that man is peace.' "

Another quote from 1884: "The late Rev. Charles J. Knowles (1804 - 1850) of Long Island, one of the most cultivated gentlemen, able scholars, and estimable characters that Greenville has ever given to the world, was a grandson of the old chieftan. And it is not too much to say that his descendants, some of whom are with us today, while others are scattered abroad through the land, are not unworthy of their noble ancestor."

http://www.kknfa.org/Knowles_Eleazer_1737.htm

http://www.kknfa.org/Knowles_Liberty_1784.htm

About the year 1640, two Knowles brothers (perhaps Thomas and Eleazer, sons of a Thomas Knowles of England), left England for the capes of Virginia. One of the two sons, Thomas, landed at New Haven, in the colony of Connecticut (among New Haven's earliest settlers). In the late Winter or early Spring of 1648, Thomas Knowles, the elder and Thomas Knowles, the junior, with others, sailed from their new home in Connecticut back to their old home in England (probably to retrieve additional family members), and were all lost at sea ....

This Knowles family story ends and genealogy begins when the grandson of the early Knowles New Haven settler, Eleazer Knowles (b 1737), [sic] with sixteen others, organized “for erecting a plantation on Pomperague." After obtaining the Indian consent, in February 1672, they adopted a brief, model code of laws for its government, and in early 1673 entered upon their new tract of land. This tract of land since known as ancient Woodbury, whose history, as well as that of the colony of Connecticut, these seventeen men and their descendants were an important part. Their first coming to the State of New York was in 1756, when, in response to a call for help, one hundred and seventy-six men of Woodbury, among them Thomas Knowles (b 1728), the grandson of Eleazer Knowles, the elder, marched to Fort William Henry, at the head of Lake George.