Evening Republican, Volume 16, Number 61, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 March 1912 — ROBERT KNIGHT REACHES 85 [ARTICLE]

ROBERT KNIGHT REACHES 85

Ownei* of Vast Textile Interests Entered Factory When a Lad of . . Eight Years. Natick, R. L—-Robert Knight, the largest individual cotton mill owner in the world, who owns cotton mills here and others in this state and Mas-

sachusetts, employing in all 7,600 hands, celebrated the eighty-fifth anniversary of his birth. He started to work in a cotton mill .77 years ago, when a boy of eight years, for 75 cents a week and never attended school until he was seventeen; then only for a year and a half. So fast did he learn, however, that at the age of nineteen he was a teacher in the district school of Exeter, Mass., his native town. During the Civil war the Robert Knight mills were among the very few that continually kept going, and his profits were large. The Knight company now owns $20,000,000 worth of cotton mills tn this town, Pontiac, Providence, Arctic, Centreville, Jackson, White Rock and Phoenix, all in Rhode Island; Reidville,. Dodgeville. Hebronville and Manchaug, in Massachusetts; Augusta and other points in Maine, and some in Connecticut.