The daily morning journal and courier., 1898-07-08
DON JUAN KNIGHT.

| manhood, is the wealthiest man in Guatemala, and one of the multi-mil- ';onaires of the day. His name is Knight, although travellers in Guate- | mala would scarcely know 1t by the | familiar Spanish cognomen-Don Juan | Knight. The late President Barrios of Guatemala estimated his friend | Knights riches at over $7,500,0 900. His annual income from his vast tracts of coffee fincas, his gold mines, his enor- nous banana plantations, and his | farms of vanilla beans his banking l and steamboat stocks, besides the debts interest on money that Guate- | mala borrowed from him, is over four | hundred thousand dollars. He lives in l a beautiful house in the suburbs of | Guatemala City, and is ccaselessly busy looking after his immense inter- ests.
 l The life of Juan Knight reads like Q chapter from the Arabian Nights"-- l this story of how poor black boy rose
 step by step from human slavery to a millionaires place. Knight never
 knew his father, because his parents were separated at a sale of slaves sevA ral months before he was born. His
 mother was a mulatto, the property of
 a tobacco grower, Daniel Upton, who
 lived in Dadeville, Tallapoosa county | Ala. Upton was a scholarly man. and l his wife was former school teacher 1 They had half dozen slaves, all of whom they treated well. Knight was
 born on the plantation one spring
 morning in 1914 or 1845. Mrs. Upton 1 gave the negro child sufficient lessons | to get him started on childish studies | by himself Later MT. Upton also be came interested in little black John" | and provided him with common school | books.
 l At about sixteen John Knight was | the most promising negro in Tallapoo- sa county. MT. Upton died In 1860, and
 the smart black boy was auctioned off i to a new master, who took him to l cotton plantation in central Alabama. The master entered the Confederate
 army. Young Black John became the
 overseer of a part of the plantation
 For four years he superintended the | gathering of the cotton and it's ship
 ment to New Orleans at the best mar ket prices until the close of the war. |
 worked as wharf laborer for a firm which handled fruits from Central America. He saved his money. In 1866 he was sent by his employer to 1 Yucatan, in Central America, to live
 there, as boss of the packing and ship
 ping of fruits to New Orleans. That
 was practically the beginning of John Knights millions.
 | A lively, wide-awake person was | something unique in those days of si-
 estas and tropical sunshine. A revolu- | ton in Guatemala, in which Ramon l Sanchez had been deposed, was just at
 it's close. Knight saw what hard work
 and an opportunity to gain the favor of | the new administration would do for | himself. He proposed that for a con- l cession of some fifty thousand acres of land suitable for pineapples and banan-
 as he would go to New Orleans and get
 the wholesale fruit dealers, who ruled
 the American markets thirty years ago, | to agree to buy two million dollars a
 year of Guatemala fruits. The Guate-
 malan overnment gladly accepted the i proposition. In less than three months
 the deal was consummated at New Or
 leans. It was the beginning of the
 trade in millions of dollars annually
 To make long story short Juan i Knight got other concessions, as he de- | demonstrated the profit there was in
 growing fruit for the United States
 market. The shipping business to New
 York and San Francisco was started
 and enormously enlarged. By 1871 the
 negro was the largest employer of labor
 in northern Guatemala. Where a mul-
 titude of white men had given up In de- | spair of ever trying to get work out of
 the lazy, improvident and careless na-
 lives of the rural regions, Knights ex- I perience among the slaves stood him in
 good stead. He was famous for the zeal he imparted to all who laborel for
 him. He married native young wo-
 man in Stapa in 1872, and the union has
 been great help to his fortunes. About twenty years ago he induced | New England capital to embark exten- l sively in coffee growing in Guatemala, | and invested his own capital in the in-
 dustry. The government gave him a
 very advantageous shipping concession
 for his efforts in bringing capital to the
 country. Coffee growing proved won-
 derfully remunerative for a dozen
 years. The negro planter branched out
 in other directions. He went to Phila- delphia and contracted to furnish many | thousands of feet of mahogany yearly l for ten years.
 There is another side to this uncom-
 mon man. He has been liberal patron
 of educational measures. He is withal
 a plain, modest man, who is not known
 by sight very far from home. He is tall i and slender and shows the effects of
 hard work and constant care and
 thought concerning his enormous busi-
 ness interests.
 There are seven children in Juan Knights home, and all have been edu-
 cated in the United States. Two of the
 boys are in a military academy in Mis- | sissippi now. One daughter is an ac-
 complished portrait painter in Boston. once a year the father and mother go
 on a trip to New Orleans and from
 there to New York. They were in Flu 1 rope in 1894
 The influence of Juan Knight, the ne | ,s, l1It