Helen Whitaker Fowle Knight

Helen Whitaker Fowle Knight (June 14, 1869 – May 4, 1948) was an American political hostess. When her widowed father, Daniel Gould Fowle, became Governor of North Carolina in 1889, she served as the state's First Lady. She was the first North Carolinian first lady to live in the North Carolina Executive Mansion.

Early life and education Knight was born Helen Whitaker Fowle in Raleigh, North Carolina on June 14, 1869, to Lieutenant-Colonel Daniel Gould Fowle, a Confederate officer and member of the North Carolina General Assembly, and his second wife, Mary Eagles Haywood. Her paternal grandfather, Samuel Richardson Fowle of Woburn, came from a prominent Massachusetts family. Through her father, she was related to colonial printers Daniel Fowle and Zechariah Fowle and the civil engineer James Fowle Baldwin. She was a great-granddaughter of John Haywood of Haywood Hall, who served as North Carolina State Treasurer, and a great-great-granddaughter of John Pugh Williams, a veteran of the American Revolutionary War.

In 1886, Fowle's mother died and her older brother, Fabius Haywood Fowle, was killed in a hunting accident.

Adult life and career When her father was elected Governor of North Carolina, Knight assumed the role of First Lady of North Carolina. She and her husband moved to Chicago, where her husband served as an assistant state attorney. She gave birth to two sons; the first son was Duerson Knight, was a flying ace in World War I and the second died in infancy.

Death Knight died of heart failure in Chicago on May 4, 1948. She is buried in her husband's family's plot at Cave Hill Cemetery in Louisville, Kentucky.