Main Street

By Luann Yetter

19th century lawyer comes up the hard way

In the 19th century, the term self-made man really meant something. Take Cyrus Knapp for instance. In 1905, Knapp was a successful lawyer living comfortably with his family in Livermore Falls. But from reflections of his boyhood years in the Lewiston Journal, we find out that Knapp came up the hard way.

Knapp was the youngest of 10 children born to a farm family in Kingfield in 1827, and his father died when he was four. Upon the elder Knapp’s death, most of the farmland passed out of the immediate family, and his mother was left with just the house and a few acres. She was unable to support all 10 children on her own, so Cyrus went to live with his uncle Nathan Peabody in New Portland, where the young boy was put to work. Even as a 6-year-old, Cyrus labored from sunrise to sunset, cutting and reaping grain alongside the men.

At age 9, Cyrus decided he’d had enough of the Peabody Farm, and he walked from New Portland to his mother’s house in Kingfield by himself. For the next few years, Knapp worked as a hired hand for a number of families in the Kingfield area. He lived day to day and place to place, without the security of a stable school or home life.

At 15, he moved to Leeds to live with his brother-in-law Lemuel Sumner, and the next year he worked on the Wood farm in Winthrop where his wages were paid half in cash and half in cloth.

Up until this point, Knapp’s education had been haphazard. He had attended school only sporadically during winter terms. But at 18, Knapp managed to enroll in Monmouth Academy, which proved to be his biggest break. After only a year at the academy, Knapp became a school teacher. Eventually, he decided to study law with Judge May in Winthrop, and at the age of 25 he passed the bar exam and was able to become a lawyer without ever attending college, let alone law school.

Knapp practiced law in East Livermore, then Auburn, and finally Livermore Falls. He was the classic old-school lawyer, persuading juries with humorous stories and intimidating his opposition with scorching sarcasm. No doubt his early struggles made him a folksy, well-respected advocate for the people of western Maine.

Luann Yetter teaches writing at the University of Maine at Farmington.