KNOX — The town of Knox is celebrating its bicentennial this year, the 200th anniversary of its formation with events held from the end of February into August. The town budget has $4,000 earmarked for celebration expenses. 

Enthusiasm over the rural town’s history ran so high in 1972 when it celebrated its sesquicentennial that the next year, 1973, the Knox Historical Association was founded, which maintains a museum in the historic Saddlemire homestead near the center of the hamlet.

A proclamation ceremony at the Knox Town Hall on Feb. 28 — the official anniversary date — will ignite the celebrations, according to Knox historian and president of the town’s historical society, Dennis Barber, as well as the historical society’s website.

That ceremony will be followed by an essay contest in March when local students will write about a favorite object in the museum, and a pageant and quilt show in April, with Knox sesquicentennial pageant winner, Cindy Quay, crowning the winner of this year’s pageant. Contest winners will then have a position in the town’s memorial day parade on May 30.

There will also be bicentennial activities at the Pucker Street Fair, on June 17 and 18, and a Stories on the Porch program held throughout the summer at the Saddlemire Homestead on Route 156, where tales of life from way back when will be recited. 

The final events will be a barbecue fundraiser at the Knox Reformed Church on Aug. 5, and a car show, live music, fireworks, and more on Aug. 6.

The last event will also feature a beard contest, for which Knox Supervisor Russell Pokorny has already put out a request to the follicly gifted that they participate with any style of facial hair to be judged within the following best-of categories: moustache, partial beard, and full beard.

All the while, a banner each will be strung up over routes 156 and 146, and various commemorative objects will be sold at different times. 

Background

Originally inhabited by the Algonquins and Iroquois tribes, according to the Knox Historical Society site, Knox was settled by German Palatines who fell under the rule of the Dutch, who had claimed land along the Hudson River in the early 17th century, after the river was first explored by Henry Hudson a few years earlier.

The Dutch set up a patroon system, a form of manorialism through which wealthy landowners profited off of local farmers. The system was retained after the British took control of the land later that century, and it was only in the 1800s that farmers actively resisted to the point of its abolition in a series of skirmishes  known as the Anti-Rent Wars. 

Also in the 1800s, the Knox pillbox industry was established by Nathan Crary, who is also reportedly credited as inventor of the device itself. Knox, which is largely agricultural otherwise, has since declared itself the pillbox capital of the world. 

Those three elements — the Anti-Rent War, pillbox production, and agriculturalism — are all contained within the Knox town seal, designed by Barber and adopted by the town in 2018.