Old Missoula

 

MONTANA MASONIC NEWS – AUGUST 2011

 

Hands Of The Workmen Hiram Knowles, Grand Master 1879

 

 

Our 14th Grand Master was Hiram Knowles. Hiram Knowles was born in Hamden, Maine, in 1834, the son of Freeman Knowles, a ship’s captain and medical doctor. When he was four years old the family moved to Illinois and two years later to Keokuk, Lee County, Iowa. In 1850, young Knowles accompanied his father west to California to search for gold, staying there a year. He was educated at Denmark Academy, Antioch College, and Harvard Law School.

 

In 1862, Knowles returned west, this time to Nevada, where he practiced law for four years, serving also as district attorney and probate judge for Humboldt County. In 1865, he moved to Idaho, and a year later to Montana. He came to Deer Lodge to practice law in 1866. Three presidents, starting with Andrew Johnson in 1868, appointed him to terms as associate justice of the territorial Supreme Court. During his first years in Montana, Knowles combined a law practice with prospecting and mining. He was re-appointed to this position, successively, in 1872 and 1876. He found the court records in a chaotic condition and during the course of his three terms organized them. In 1879, Knowles resigned from the bench to return to the private practice of law. He was again in private practice in Butte, Montana from 1879 to 1890. He was married to Mary C. Curtis in 1871 in Athens, Clark County, Missouri. In 1884, in his one excursion into politics, Knowles ran unsuccessfully for territorial delegate to Congress, he was defeated by Hon. J.K. Toole. Judge Knowles also served as a member of the Montana Constitutional Convention in 1889. In 1890, President Benjamin Harrison appointed Knowles federal district judge for the Montana district. He served in that position until his retirement in 1904 and was in private practice, in Missoula until his death. Judge Hiram Knowles died April 6, 1916.

 

Judge Knowles died on the train while returning home to Missoula, Montana from a trip to Los Angeles. Judge Hiram Knowles, taken suddenly ill on a train ride home to Missoula, died in his berth on the Oregon Short Line. The end came shortly after noon near Spencer, Idaho, as the train approached Monida Pass and the Montana that Knowles adopted as his home in its early territorial days. At his side were his wife Mary and his daughter, Eloise. The train carrying Knowles’ body was greeted by a large contingent at Butte that evening. The 77-year-old Knowles, who served as federal judge in Montana from 1890 to 1904, was a longtime diabetic. He and Mary were returning from a three-month stay in Southern California, where they’d gone for his declining health. He was severely stricken two nights earlier in the train’s dining car, and was all but paralyzed when Eloise joined her parents at Idaho Falls, Idaho. Judge Hiram Knowles was honored as an outstanding pioneer of Montana, a man of high integrity, who had come to his new home state when it was an undeveloped Territory, inhabited by savage tribes and buffaloes. He conducted his own law practice; was identified with the Masons in which he served as Grand Master. Though Knowles spent much of his time in Helena, often sleeping in his chambers, his family home was in Missoula. In 1889, he platted the Knowles Addition, in the historic McCormick neighborhood south of the Clark Fork River. Knowles was buried at Hillcrest Cemetery in Deer Lodge alongside three of his children.

 

Brother Knowles was already a Mason when he came to the Montana Territory; he served as WM of Deer Lodge No. 14 in 1876. In 1879 as Grand Master of Montana Masons Hiram Knowles, had just retired after eleven years as a territorial justice and was an ardent enemy of vigilantism because of his strong association with the courts he found any suggestion of a link between the vigilantes and the Masons as an embarrassment and it was a topic that angered him. During the Annual Communication in 1880, Grand Master Knowles sought legislation to permit what is now known as the conferring of a courtesy degree. “There ought to be some regulation by which an Entered Apprentice from another jurisdiction can be advanced in the jurisdiction where he made his home…without having to undergo an additional apprenticeship,” The recommendation did not pass at that time.

 

An interesting example of one of his rulings as a Judge was in May of 1903 “Helena, Montana, May 18 – Judge Hiram Knowles, in the United States Court here today held in effect that the President had no right to set apart lands as forest reserves which are subject to entry under the homestead laws. The Government sought to recover $28, the value of the twenty logs cut by Matt Blendauer on 160 acres of land he had entered under homestead laws, which had been included as part of Lake Como forest reserve in a Presidential proclamation. The Government also sought damages in the sum of $100. Judge Knowles also overruled the demurrer of the District Attorney to the answer of the defendant in the action. Fifteen townships are involved in the decision and were withdrawn from settlement for the purpose of including them in the forest reserve. It was contended that they were not public lands, because they were held in reserve from 1855 to 1871. The Government bought the lands from the Indians in 1859, paying therefor $100,000. Judge Knowles holds that the act of 1874 did not restore them to the general mass of the public domain, and therefore the President had no right to set them apart as a forest reserve.”

 

Reid Gardiner, Grand Secretary