William Knight (Wisconsin politician)

William Knight (December 7, 1843 – January 13, 1941), often referred to as Wm. Knight, was a businessman from Bayfield, Wisconsin, involved at one time or another as a merchant, in lumbering, banking, selling real estate, and orchardist, who served one term as a Republican member of the Wisconsin State Assembly.

Knight was born December 7, 1843, on a farm in Kent County, Delaware, near Dover. Until the age of twelve, he attended his local public schools. At that time, he switched to academies in Camden and then Dover, followed by two years at the Hudson River Institute in Claverack, New York.

After leaving school, he moved to Detroit, where he worked as a clerk at a mustering and disbursement office of the United States government. He left Detroit in 1867, going first to St. Louis, then to Wyoming (where he operated as a merchant). He left there in 1869, coming to Bayfield, where he settled (except for a year in Ashland, spending most of the ensuing decades in the banking and lumbering trades. By 1910, he had shifted to selling real estate and developing fruit orchards.

Knight had already served on his town board and his county board of supervisors, as well as county clerk and treasurer (appointed to fill a vacancy in 1896) of Bayfield County, Wisconsin when he was elected in 1910 to represent the Assembly seat for Bayfield, Sawyer and Washburn counties. A Republican, he received 2,558 votes to 355 for Social Democrat H. Johnson (Republican incumbent Frank Hammill was not a candidate). He was assigned to the standing committee on banks, and the joint committee on finance.

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