“The Knight Family: Part II,” Tambuli, Nov. 1989, 7
The Knight Family:
Part II
In the October issue, William G. Hartley described how the Joseph Knight family had befriended Joseph Smith and had become faithful and loyal witnesses of his divine work. Their belief in the restored gospel was so strong that they willingly gave up their New York houses, lands, and livelihood to follow the Prophet in an 1832 move to Ohio. In 1833, they followed the Prophet’s counsel once again and move to Missouri. But Missouri was not to be their home for long, and the challenges they had met thus far were just a taste of what lay before them.
Near Independence, Missouri, the Knights eagerly pitched in to establish the area as a center place for Zion and for a great temple. When twelve men laid the first log as a foundation of Zion, five were Knight relatives. Newel Knight was one of seven who dedicated the Jackson County temple site. For the Knight clan, such ceremonies stirred hope of a great future, despite the tragedies among them. Mother Knight had been so sick on the trip from Ohio that Newel brought along lumber for her coffin. Her “greatest desire,” he wrote, was “to set her feet upon the land of Zion and to have her body buried” there. She became the first Saint buried in Missouri. That year, death claimed two more Knights—one of them Newel’s sister Esther, the other his uncle, Aaron Culver.
This outpost colony of the Church saw a busy year of building, fencing, and establishing homes while consecrating the colony’s properties to live cooperatively. When the Church formed a council of high priests to govern the stake in Missouri, Newel Knight became one of the council. He continued to be president of what was still called the Colesville Branch. Six Knight men also pledged their labor as part of plans to build the Independence Temple.
Father Knight remarried, to Phoebe Crosby Peck, his first wife’s widowed sister-in-law. Phoebe had four children of her own, and the couple had two more. Counting Phoebe’s four, they were the parents and stepparents of thirteen children.
In the last half of 1833 Missourians drove the Saints, including the Knight clan, from Jackson County. Mobbers shot Philo Dibble, whom Newel Knight saved from death through a remarkable priesthood blessing.1 Fearing for their lives, the Knights braved the cold weather and rushed to the Missouri River ferries. Joseph Knight, Jr., told of women and children walking with bare feet on frozen ground. The Knights lost all their property, including a gristmill. Of that awful winter, Sally Knight’s sister, Emily Colburn Slade, recalled, “We lived in tents until winter set in, and did our cooking out in the wind and storms.”2 Suffering from poor food and shelter, many Saints became victims of fever and what was called ague (probably malaria). Sally was one of them. She gave birth to a son, who died, and then she died herself. “Truly she died as a martyr to the gospel,” her husband, Newel, eulogized.
In 1835, Newel traveled to Ohio to help build the temple and to receive temple blessings. At Kirtland, he boarded with his good friends Hyrum and Jerusha Smith. There he met and fell in love with Lydia Goldthwaite Bailey, whose belief in Joseph Smith was equal to his.
A few years previous, Lydia’s husband had deserted her, and both of her children had died, so her family sent her to Canada for a change of scenery. In late 1833, while staying with the Nickerson family, she heard Joseph Smith preach and saw his face “become white and a shining glow seemed to beam from every feature.”3 This witness of the Spirit converted her. She then moved to Kirtland. On 24 November 1835, Joseph Smith performed Newel and Lydia’s wedding at Hyrum Smith’s home. The ceremony was the first marriage performed by the Prophet.4
Newel took Lydia to Missouri—just in time to join the Mormon exodus from Clay County to Far West. When Joseph Smith also moved to Far West in 1838, Newel rejoiced to again hear the Prophet preach: “His words were meat and drink for us.”
Unfortunately, the strife that had beset the Church did not abate. The Knights in Far West were saddened to see several leading elders forsake the Church. The high council Newel Knight served on had to cut off the entire Missouri stake presidency, including David and John Whitmer, two Book of Mormon witnesses. Oliver Cowdery also veered away.5 Missourians were also clashing again with the Saints, and once more in winter 1838–39, Church members surrendered homes and lands and became refugees. The Knight clan struggled across Missouri to Illinois.
Within a few months, the Knight and Peck families had moved to where Nauvoo would rise. They now included at least eleven family units—four headed by members of Father Knight’s generation, seven by Newel’s generation. They had passed the tests of loyalty the troubles at Kirtland and Missouri had thrown at them. Since converting nine years before, they had moved to five settlements, including the present one. (Notably, between 1831 and 1846, the Knights helped to pioneer ten Latter-day Saint settlements in Ohio, Missouri, Illinois, Iowa, and Nebraska.6) Unlike the Three Witnesses and other prominent leaders of the Church, they had not lost their faith. Despite suffering great losses of property, they did not turn against their religion. The family’s bill of damages for losses in Missouri alone reached $16,000, or more than U.S. $500,000 today.7
In Illinois, Newel Knight eagerly greeted the Prophet shortly after he arrived from his long incarceration in Missouri prisons. Newel described that meeting thus: “As soon as I could I went to see him, but I can never describe my feelings on meeting with him, and shaking hands with one whom I had so long and so dearly loved, his worth and his sufferings filled my heart with mingled emotions, while I beheld him and reflected upon the past, and yet saw him standing before me, in the full dignity of his holy calling, I could only raise my heart in silent but ardent prayer that he and his family and his aged parents may never be torn apart in like manner again.”
Once more, the Knights went to work building up the Church and a new city—Nauvoo, the “City of Joseph.” Newel served on the high council. He and Joseph Knight, Jr., built several gristmills. About the time the Prophet gave Father Knight the cane, the city council voted to give him a lot and built him a house. Still in use today, Knight Street memorializes Joseph Smith’s esteem for the Knights.
One day in January 1842, the Prophet listed in the Book of the Law of the Lord the names of those “faithful few” who had stood by him since the beginning of his ministry—“pure and holy friends, who are faithful, just, and true, and whose hearts fail not.” He included Father Knight: “My aged and beloved brother, Joseph Knight, Sen., who was among the number of the first to administer to my necessities, while I was laboring in the commencement of the bringing forth of the work of the Lord. … For fifteen years he has been faithful and true, and even-handed and exemplary, and virtuous and kind, never deviating to the right hand or to the left. Behold he is a righteous man, may God Almighty lengthen out the old man’s days. … And it shall be said of him, by the sons of Zion, while there is one of them remaining, that this man was a faithful man in Israel; therefore his name shall never be forgotten.”
The Prophet also recalled Father Knight’s sons, “Newell Knight and Joseph Knight, Jun., whose names I record … with unspeakable delight, for they are my friends.”8
In Nauvoo, the Knight group faced and passed another great test of faith. The Prophet introduced several doctrines relating to the temple, including the temple ceremonies and plural marriage, which some could not accept.9 But the Knights received the teachings. They helped to finish the temple and then performed baptisms for the dead. By early 1846, more than twenty adults in the Knight families had received their temple endowments and sealings. Four of Father and Polly Knight’s children entered into plural marriage.
When Joseph and Hyrum Smith died, few mourned their passing more than the Knights. Newel’s heart broke, and he vented his sorrow in his journal: “O how I loved those men, and rejoiced under their teachings! it seems as if all is gone, and as if my very heart strings will break, and were it not for my beloved wife and dear children I feel as if I have nothing to live for. … I pray God my Father that I may be reconciled to my lot, and live and die a faithful follower of the teachings of our Murdered Prophet and Patriarch.”
Following the martyrdom, the Knights passed still another severe test of loyalty. Unlike a number of others, they did not forsake the faith and follow false successors. They chose to follow the Quorum of the Twelve. All the relatives in Nauvoo (except perhaps Nahum, for whom we lack records) left the city to go westward. When ready to depart, Newel Knight “once more had the satisfaction of walking through the streets of the City of Joseph, and beholding the great works, he had so nobly reared before his martyrdom.” Once across the Mississippi River, Newel looked back a last time at the city: “My heart swelled, for I beheld at a glance, from the hills where I stood, the noble works of Joseph the Prophet and Seer, and Hyrum his patriarch, with whom I had been acquainted, even from their boyhood, I knew their worth, and mourned their loss.”
While moving west with the exiled Saints, Newel died of exposure in northern Nebraska in January 1847. Father Knight died at Mount Pisgah in Iowa a month later. The family, from the Church’s second year to its fourteenth, sacrificed some of its best blood for the gospel’s sake. Of Father Knight’s thirteen children and their spouses, six individuals died, one couple remains unaccounted for, and the remaining seventeen reached Utah.
The Knights are silent witnesses of Joseph Smith and the restored gospel. Lydia wrote her life story. Newel kept an invaluable journal. Father Knight and Joseph, Jr., both penned their recollections. All four authors revered Joseph Smith.
The Knight families knew Joseph Smith in the earliest days, when he was accused of gold-digging and using peep stones. If Joseph Smith were a charlatan or disreputable money grubber as detractors charged, the large Knight clan would not have felt such deep trust in him. Their loyalty to him was based on firsthand, intimate knowledge, which stands today as a solid witness that the Prophet’s character, from when he was twenty to his death at thirty-eight, was righteous and good.
Critics of Joseph Smith have questioned his motives, truthfulness, and divine claims. Defenders have argued that God used him to restore the true church to the earth. The debate and discussion should not ignore the faithful and solid Knight family, who remained loyal to the prophet longer than any other family. The Knights bear a powerful, persistent testimony that Joseph Smith was what he claimed to be.
The cane that Joseph Smith gave to Father Knight in Nauvoo continues to pass down the generations of Knights from one Joseph to another. It is just one memorial of the friendship and mutual faith Joseph Smith and the Joseph Knight family shared.
Family Chart:
Children of Joseph Knight, Sr., and first wife, Polly Peck:
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Nahum Knight (married Thankfull)
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Esther Knight (married William Stringham)
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Newel Knight (married Sally Colburn and Lydia Goldthwaite)
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Anna Knight (married Freeborn DeMille)
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Joseph Knight, Jr. (married Betsey Covert, Adeline Johnson, Abba Welden, and Mary Woolerton)
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Polly Knight (married William Stringham)
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Elizabeth Knight (married Joseph W. Johnson)
Children of Joseph Knight, Sr., and second wife, Phoebe Crosby Peck:
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Hezekiah Peck (married Jemima Smoot)
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Samantha Peck (married Hosea Stout)
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Henrietta Peck (married Thomas R. Rich)
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Sarah Jane Peck (married Charles C. Rich)
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Ether Knight (married Jane Terry)
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Charles C. Knight (died as a child)
Illustrated by Paul Mann