(Note: birth date given in original as "ca. 1813.") lawyer, politician, b. Canandaigua, N.Y. He was the brother of Wiram Knowlton (q.v.). He joined his brother and parents in Janesville about 1838. He moved to Shullsburg in 1847, where he was admitted to the bar and served for several years as county judge. A Whig and later Republican, he was state assemblyman (1854, 1856). In 1856 he returned to Janesville, and represented that district in the assembly (1858). Knowlton was a leading Wisconsin attorney during the 1850's, and participated in several of the legal and political controversies of that period. He was one of the attorneys defending circuit judge Levi Hubbell (q.v.) in his 1853 impeachment trial, and in 1856 was an attorney for Coles Bashford (q.v.) when Bashford contested the election of William A. Barstow (q.v.) as governor. While serving in the assembly in 1858, Knowlton was head of the committee investigating the La Crosse and Milwaukee R.R. land-grant frauds, and played a leading role in that investigation. In 1862 he was the unsuccessful candidate of the farm mortgagors for the office of state supreme court justice. After being defeated for this office, he moved to Chicago where he practiced law until his death. J. R. Berryman, ed., Bench and Bar of Wis. (2 vols., Chicago, 1898); Proc. State Bar Assoc. Wis., 1881 (1883); Colls. State Hist. Soc. Wis., 9 (1882); Madison Wis. State Journal, Jan. 31, 1879.

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[Source: Dictionary of Wisconsin biography]