Thomas Knott Really Should Be Famous
He hung out with Snowshoe Thompson. Built a sawmill in Carson Canyon way back in 1853, before it became Woodfords. Got stiffed by John Reese for a whopping $2 grand after building two more mills in Genoa. And left behind one of the most important (and most overlooked) historical accounts chronicling his life in early Carson Valley. But if you’ve never heard of Thomas Knott, you’re definitely not alone.
Knott entered the world on April 13, 1808, near Steubenville, Ohio. Growing up amid ten brothers, one older sister, and two half-brothers, he certainly must have had his struggles – over getting his share at the dinner table, if nothing else. Hard work produced a “frame and muscle that were little less than gigantic,” and Knott became “inured to hardships” in his youth (his obituary would later say).
At seventeen, he landed his first real job — as a millwright. Knott would spend the next nine years (through 1834) building sawmills and grist mills in towns across Ohio. It was exacting work, making cogged wooden gears that would mesh with wrought iron spindles in just the right way to drive a sawblade through timber or turn a mill stone.
In November 1828, Knott married the former Hannah Bell. He and Hannah would eventually have a total of nine children together, but Knott seemed to develop an especially close relationship with son Elzy, his second child, born December 31, 1832. Knott moved his family to Indiana in 1835, then to Michigan in 1840, all while continuing to work as a mill-builder.
The Gold Rush, of course, was soon all the news, and naturally attracted Knott’s attention. But he was a practical fellow. Avoiding the earliest crush of gold-seekers in ‘49, he crossed the plains with son Elzy in the summer of 1852, arriving at Placerville that September. And, rather than roll the dice mining for gold, Thomas and Elzy eked out a steady if unexciting living operating a small hardware store at Placerville through the winter, selling mining tools and other goods to the miners. [The Knotts had several business partners in the Placerville store including John L. Cary, someone they may have met back in Indiana, and possibly even emigrated with.].
But Thomas Knott was, after all, a mill-builder by trade. And on his journey west, his experienced eye had noticed what he later would describe as “the ideal spot for a sawmill” in Carson Canyon. The vicinity seemed ripe for settlement, too, situated right on the the Emigrant Trail and close to rich Carson Valley. Best of all, it was as-yet unclaimed land.
Knott couldn’t quite stop thinking about the possibilities for a new mill. And acquaintance John “Snowshoe” Thompson just might have tipped the scale. A generation younger than Knott, at 26 years old (compared to Knott’s 45), Thompson had been mining (rather unsuccessfully) at nearby Coon Hollow. Exactly how they met is unclear; but perhaps it was at the hardware store where Knott worked.
One way or another, the two got to talking. And a plan was soon hatched. In March, 1853, Knott, his son Elzy, and Snowshoe Thompson left Placerville together, heading east back across the Sierra. It would turn into a three-and-a-half day nightmare. The trio found themselves battling snow two to ten feet deep. By the time they reached Genoa, even the hardy Thomas Knott realized his timing had been poor. But it was “too great a risk,” he realized, to attempt a return to Placerville for another few months.
Taking stock of his surroundings in Carson Valley, Knott discovered he could buy cheap flour from a westward-bound wagon train similarly marooned by the weather at Genoa. And herds of cattle at the head of the canyon awaiting the road’s opening could provide them with a ready source of meat and butter.
Deciding to wait no longer, Knott set about work on his happily-imagined mill. The three men camped “at the mouth of the big canyon where the Carson River comes out of the mountains,” and Knott “set [his] stakes.” They didn’t have far to go for building material; “a fine flat of pine timber” awaited them on the south side of the creek.
A team of three men was soon engaged on the project, in addition to Knott himself, though his memoirs don’t include their names. One was almost certainly son, Elzy; and Snowshoe Thompson was probably a second. (Snowshoe wouldn’t file his own 320-acre claim in nearby Diamond Valley until 1859). John L. Cary may well have been the third. They didn’t stop with the mill; they also erected a small house nearby.
Once the road over the mountains opened for teams again in late May, Knott sent for a 190-pound cast-iron mill crank, a blacksmith’s anvil, a vise, and assorted tools. In addition, he and his crew scavenged parts from abandoned wagons as far away as the Forty Mile Desert — some 400 metal wagon tires, 40 or 50 log chains, and other metal to make wrought iron straps, bands, bolts, nails, pins, clamps, and other parts. “We found all the tools left in [the] valley by immigrants that I needed,” he would say later.
The new mill was powered by a “large stream of water that flowed out of the side of the mountain, and cascaded down.” Knott dug a ditch to carry this flow to his mill, and boasted that the site enjoyed a 24-foot “head and fall.” The water drove a wooden “flutter wheel,” which in turn powered an “upright sash saw.” (Sadly, that generous flow of water would slow to a trickle in the 1920s, following an earthquake, according to local Grant Merrill.)
By July of 1853, Knott was successfully sawing lumber at his new establishment – the first sawmill in the entire Carson Valley region. Knott and Thompson also built a string of bridges in the canyon, operating the improvements briefly as a toll road. (Knott is said to have permitted famous explorer Kit Carson and his sheep to pass for free in 1853-54.).
But once he’d finished the mill, Knott didn’t stay put for long. In 1853, he sold his brand new mill and house to his former partner in the hardware business, John L. Cary, and moved on to greener pastures in Genoa – or so he thought.
John Reese had promised to pay Knott the astonishing sum of $2,000 to construct two mills at Genoa — a sawmill and a grist mill, powered by water from a canyon to the north. So Knott went to work again. By July, 1854, the new Genoa sawmill was up and running, employing a 30-foot overshot wheel, producing lumber for some of the first frame houses in town. And before long, the grist mill was finished as well.
But when the bill came due, Reese couldn’t pay. It wasn’t entirely his fault; an associate charged with taking cattle to California for sale never bothered to return with the proceeds. Nonetheless, this left Knott in a terrible pickle. He never did recover the huge sum of money owed to him by Reese.
There’s a great deal more to Knott’s life story: losing young son Elzy to a tragic gambling dispute; witnessing the turmoil of the Paiute Indian War; building yet another mill near Carson City. But soon he’d had enough of the West.
About 1860 Knott made his way East again, finally getting “home safe to Tipton, Iowa.” There he would remain through 1877, farming and operating a small flour mill, and eventually trading his Iowa property for a small farm in Illinois in March, 1878.
Thomas Knott passed away from pneumonia on February 16, 1887, near Mt. Vernon, Illinois. He was 79 years old. All told, he’d built mills and bridges in five different states, including the “first permanent improvements” in future Nevada. But perhaps the most significant legacy he left was his first-person account of his adventurous life, penned in 1881. And how that came to be published is a story in itself.
Sixty years after Knott wrote down his memories, a son shared that manuscript with Placerville publisher Herbert Hamlin. Recognizing the value of the account, Hamlin published portions of Knott’s account in the Pony Express Courier. Hamlin went on to glean additional details about Knott’s life from the pioneer’s sons and granddaughter. In 1947 Hamlin published just one hundred copies of a booklet he called the Knott Reminiscences, an annotated copy of Knott’s original with added footnotes, photographs, and more. It’s a much-overlooked but significant contribution to the history of Carson Valley and Alpine.
This past June (2025), we were privileged to tag along as two Knott family descendants searched for the precise location of Thomas Knott’s early 1853 sawmill in Woodfords Canyon. And by George, we believe that they found it. It wasn’t west of the blinking light at all (as I’d long thought). Instead, the mill sat just below and slightly east of Woodfords Station – with even a few pieces of hand-forged metal strapping left behind to help confirm the location.
And while Thomas Knott himself still isn’t famous, he really ought to be. Hope you’ll keep his story alive!
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Grateful thanks to Knott family descendants Mike Saxton and Clark Pillsbury for finally solving the mystery of Thomas Knott’s long-lost mill site, sharing their outstanding research, and for their generous help with this story. Any remaining errors are strictly my own.