Death
In 1806 while visiting a friend Knox swallowed a chicken bone, which lodged in his throat and became infected. He died at home three days later, on October 25, 1806, and was buried on his estate in Thomaston with full military honors.
Lucy died in 1824, having sold off more portions of the family properties to pay the creditors of Knox's insolvent estate. The couple had 13 children although only one son, Henry Jackson Knox, survived to adulthood, and he was known for his drinking and scandalous behavior. Repenting and "impressed with a deep sense of his own unworthiness,' upon his death in 1832 the wastrel son Henry requested that his remains not be interred with his honored relatives but deposited in a common burial ground "with no stone to tell where."
Montpelier remained in the family until it was demolished in 1871 to make way for the Brunswick-Rockland railroad line. The only surviving structure is an outbuilding that currently houses the Thomaston Historical Society. The current Montpelier Museum is a 20th century reconstruction not far from the original's site.
Read more about this topic: Henry Knox
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“‘Tis no great valor to perish sword in hand, and bravado on lip; cased all in panoply complete. For even the alligator dies in his mail, and the swordfish never surrenders. To expire, mild-eyed, in one’s bed, transcends the death of Epaminondas.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“So long as the law considers all these human beings, with beating hearts and living affections, only as so many things belonging to the master—so long as the failure, or misfortune, or imprudence, or death of the kindest owner, may cause them any day to exchange a life of kind protection and indulgence for one of hopeless misery and toil—so long it is impossible to make anything beautiful or desirable in the best-regulated administration of slavery.”
—Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896)
“Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay?
Repair me now, for now mine end doth haste;
I run to death, and death meets me as fast,
And all my pleasures are like yesterday.”
—John Donne (1572–1631)