Colonel Henry Knox was hard not to notice

From 1776 by David McCulough. Page 58.

Colonel Henry Knox was hard not to notice. Six feet tall, he bulked large, weighing perhaps 250 pounds. He had a booming voice. He was gregarious, jovial, quick of mind, highly energetic—“very fat, but very active”—and all of twenty-five.

“Town-born” in Boston, in a narrow house on Sea Street facing the harbor, he was seventh of the ten sons of Mary Campbell and William Knox, Scotch-Irish Presbyterians. When his father, a shipmaster, disappeared in the West Indies, nine-year-old Henry went to work to help support his mother, and was thus, like Nathanael Greene, almost entirely self-educated. He became a bookseller, eventually opening his own London Book Store on Cornhill Street, offering a “large and very elegant assortment” of the latest books and magazines from London. In the notices he placed in the Boston Gazette, the name Henry Knox always appeared in larger type than the name of the store.

Though not especially prosperous, the store became “a great resort for British officers and Tory ladies,” “a fashionable morning lounge,” and its large, genial proprietor became one of the best-known young men in town. John Adams, a frequent patron, remembered Knox as a youth “of pleasing manners and inquisitive turn of mind.” Another patron was Nathanael Greene, who not only shared Knox’s love of books, but also an interest in “the military art,” and it was thus, on the eve of war, that an important friendship had commenced.