AUBURN — For almost half a century, an extraordinary man lived “in a little old house on the edge of the falls in Auburn,” a hero of America’s most brutal war whose pioneering, inventive and courageous spirit deserves more honor than our forgetful age has provided.

John Adams Knight lived with his sister in the oldest house in downtown Auburn from 1871 until his death in 1918, initially beside a little grocery store his family operated and later next door to an industrial plant that arose on the same parcel.

But his life was not always so quiet and out-of-the-way.

In the early years of the Civil War, Knight ran the only pro-Union newspaper published in Europe: The London American.

It operated two doors down on Fleet Street from one touting the Confederate cause to an English audience.

At the time, many of England’s leading politicians and business owners sided openly with the South, which had cotton needed by British mills.

As a consequence, Knight didn’t always find a grateful audience.

“When the news came that the confederates had fired on Fort Sumter, we hoisted the Yankee Doodle flag at the head of our editorial columns, and in three weeks we lost over half our subscribers and nearly all of our advertising,” Knight later told The Boston Globe.

He never got any help from American officials or taxpayers.

“In any other government but our own,” the Lewiston Evening Journal later noted, “he would have received substantial aid from the national treasury, but in this case he was left to fight the battles of his country alone and amidst the hostile environment of a foreign land.”

Knight’s paper struggled to stay afloat almost from the start, stymied by the divisive atmosphere of the Civil War and the paper’s inability to find a steady editor who could navigate the messy politics that surrounded it.

“Putting the flag on The London American cost me my fortune,” Knight said in his old age, “but I never regretted the sacrifice. It is the first flag to stand absolutely for human freedom.”

Growing up in Maine

Knight was born in 1824 in Westbrook, the son of a farmer who lived on a tract “hewed out of the wilderness many years before by his great-great-grandfather, who had been an officer in the English navy and then detailed to go to Westbrook” as one of the king’s foresters. His charge: to hunt for tall, straight pines that could become masts for warships.

In those days, foresters marked the trees for the king’s use and punished severely anyone who dared cut them down.

Knight’s ancestor established a 500-acre farm that housed generations of his descendants.

During the Civil War, John Adams Knight told an English audience about one of them: a grandfather who lost his leg at the Battle of Bunker Hill.

A reporter at the event added that Knight “is strongly inclined to follow his example, if need be, in support of the Union.”

When Knight was 11, he moved with his parents to Monson for a couple of years, but the family moved back to Westbrook two years later.

In 1844, at the age of 20 and almost entirely self-educated, Knight struck out on his own.

He headed first to Scarborough, where he started a carding and grist mill that operated for five years.

Then Knight moved on to Auburn, setting up a village grocery store near the city center.

The Journal said he “met with more or less success” until he decided in 1853 to investigate a family tale about property tied up in an English chancery court that belonged to the Knights, one of many families that latched onto the notion that somewhere back in the old country were riches and maybe castles that could be reclaimed.

Those notions rarely materialized, but Knight began to make money in the United Kingdom by helping other Americans probe their family’s past for lost land or treasure. It proved a reasonably lucrative business, successful for him if not necessarily for the dreamers over in the New World.

Then Knight met George Hazelton from Massachusetts, an editor and good writer. They conspired to start a newspaper that would focus on news from America, a mostly overlooked place in the British press.

Thus was the London American born.

A voice for the Union

Knight’s paper, which began publication in May 1860, scooped up the news from every vessel arriving in British ports.

The paper promised to focus on commerce, patent law and U.S. politics, items that Knight hoped would attract readers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. It didn’t even mention the growing political division between North and South for weeks. Nor did it take sides until secession turned to war.

To some degree, at least, it was just a coincidence that the newspaper’s arrival on the scene coincided with the start of the Civil War, which suddenly made American developments hot news across the globe.

Not until May 1861 did Knight’s paper admit that “Pandora’s box is open. The greatest physical and moral evil that can afflict humanity has dawned upon the people of the American Union. War has arrived.”

It put the blame squarely on “leading Southern politicians” and former President James Buchanan. They had, the paper said, committed “gore-faced treason.”

Initially, the paper thrived because of the new interest in what was going on in the United States.

But the London papers, never ones to miss an opportunity to sell more copies, quickly began to compete fiercely, ending the London American’s unique hold on developments in the growing war.

Knight’s paper stood steadfast for the Union, denouncing the Confederacy at every turn.

For example, early in 1862 in a piece widely reprinted by newspapers in his homeland, Knight’s London American reported on a speech by George Train lambasting English skepticism of the North’s chances on the battlefield.

“Can the South subjugate the North?” Train asked. “That is the way to put the American question in an understandable way to Englishmen.”

“Can seven millions of disorganized traitors overpower 20 millions of united patriots? Or, in other words, is it possible for 400,000 slave owners who have succeeded in enslaving four millions of blacks, bring again into bondage 20 free states and make slaves of free citizens of the North as they have the white men of the South?” asked Train, who later wrote for the London American.

Knight said his pro-Union stance cost him half his subscribers. It didn’t help, he said, that the South was spreading payments around to English newspapers to take its side while the Union’s diplomats refused to engage in something similar.

The Chicago Tribune in 1862 hailed Knight’s paper as “the vehicle of facts and a strong, intelligent and earnest exposure of the trickeries of secession presses and sympathizers abroad. Its course throughout the whole of this rebellion thus far has been discreet, sound and effective.”

It added, though, that the paper was struggling and urged help for Knight so that it would “not go down.”

Knight begged for Union backers to subscribe to his paper, but few did.

In his journal, American diplomat Benjamin Moran noted that Knight had been pleading for more aid and subscriptions from Americans who saw its value in promoting the Union to European readers.

“The scheme is hopeless , and for all the good it does the journal had better die,” Moran wrote.

He got his wish.

In May of 1863, The Daily Picayune in New Orleans reported the London American “is dead, from want of money.”

Trying to hang on in London

Knight said he closed the doors to the paper and returned to his old claims business.

He touted in advertisements his legal services aimed at helping Americans “secure the payment of old and unsettled claims” for property or to assist “heirs to British estates.”

A phrenological journal, which typically focused on studying the shapes of human heads in the bizarre notion they proved whether people were superior or inferior, called Knight “the most competent person” on Chancery Lane for the legal work he sought.

But legal work wasn’t paying off so Knight branched out to his many other interests.

Even when the London American was churning out issues, it hadn’t been quite enough for Knight.

In 1861, he secured a patent for “a new or improved mode of inflating air-mattresses and air-cushions” and another for an improvement in “steam-pumping engines.”

They at least sound practical.

Another of his inventions that year — “an improved apparatus for rendering fatty or oleaginous matter, and delivering the same” — may have been practical as well, but far less appealing.

The demise of his newspaper didn’t keep Knight from his inventive spirit.

In 1867, when he called himself an engineer and sewing machine manufacturer, he sought a patent for a “nose bag” that would let a horse eat as it walked without restricting its head movements. It involved a fabric sack attached to the horse with “cords, straps, bands or chains.”

In later years, he patented an astonishing assortment of products, ranging from a pillow sham frame to a spring for the rear wheel on a bicycle. Among his other creations were a folding table for writing, map drawers and something to do with labels for “Farmington Sugar Corn.”

He didn’t make much money off any of them.

Back home in Auburn

Knight came home to Auburn in 1871 and never left for long again.

He lived with his sister Ruth, working in the grocery, puttering with his inventions and entertaining neighbors and friends with stories from his busy life.

The little house where they lived, originally constructed in 1796, had been moved a couple of times, eventually sitting next door to Ferd Penley’s slaughterhouse and beef emporium on Knight Street, which no longer exists.

Not until 1970 did the house end up at its current spot, at the entrance to West Pitch Park next door to the bus station and a senior housing building beside the Androscoggin River. The house has been cared for by the Androscoggin Historical Society since 2013.

Knight never married. But the Lewiston Daily Sun noted that he had no shortage of people around him.

He “made friends with all he ever met,” the Sun said.

It wasn’t easy on him, though.

He complained to a reporter in 1914 that “I lack strength and I lack money.”

At Knight’s death four years later, the Journal said his life was “replete with human interest, heroic in its endeavors, pathetically tragic in its disappointments, a life once intimately related to international affairs” came to an end “in the most humble and obscure surroundings here in Auburn.”

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