Born: c. 1821 in Vermont
Died: June 23, 1892, age 73 years
Married: first wife?; Harriet; Mary Ann
Children: Rachel, Mary, John J. Nokes
Leonard Nokes was one of the early settlers of the Town of Harrietstown, enumerated in the U.S. Census of 1850. He was a farmer, apparently married to Harriet Nokes, with two daughters, Rachel, 7, born in Illinois, and Mary, age 1. He served as supervisor of the Town in 1859 and 1861-62, and as its commissioner of highways in 1867.
His son's obituary described him as "a well-known lumberman who owned large tracts of land in the southern part of his county. The old Nokes homestead was the first frame house built in West Harrietstown."
Leonard Nokes is buried in the Harrietstown Cemetery. Harriet Nokes, named "second wife of Leonard Nokes" died February 29, 1856 at the age of 36 and is buried there also. Mary Ann Nokes, also named as "wife of Leonard Nokes," died on February 1, 1887 at the age of 65.
Plattsburg Republican, December 17, 1887
EDITORIAL NOTES.
Saranac Lake Village. the Adirondack Sanitarium, &c.
. . . On a fine piece of upland to the westward is the handsome home farm of Leonard Nokes, the old pioneer pathfinder and road-builder, who superintended the building of the plank road from Saranac to the Chateaugay Ore & Iron Co. in developing their great iron mine, which has since turned out so many hundred thousand tons of the best steel ores, building up a village at Lyon Mountain second in population to only one in Clinton county, and transforming what was before a trackless wilderness into a busy locality. The old road builder doubtless lives over his past life as he sits in his pleasant home and sees the trains of [railroad] cars pass and re-pass on the plain below, and we hope he will live many years yet to see the boom which this railroad enterprise is destined to introduce into his own region. . . .
From Duane Hamilton Hurd, History of Clinton and Franklin Counties, 1880; reprint edition, 1978, page 503:
In 1819, so said Harvey Moody, when he arrived with his father, Jacob Moody, "their nearest neighbor on the Northwest Bay Road--probably the only road at that time in what is now Harrietstown and Brighton--was Isaac Livingston, who lived five and a half miles north, at the Nokes settlement, now known as West Harrietstown."
