Belknap Hardware and Manufacturing Company, also known as Belknap Hardware Company or simply Belknap Hardware, located in Louisville, Kentucky, was at one time a leading American manufacturer of hardware goods and a major wholesale competitor of retail sales companies Sears, Roebuck, and Company and Montgomery Ward. Belknap excelled both in catalog sales and widespread distribution of its own name-brand manufactured products. [1]
The company's founder William Burke Belknap the elder (1811–1884) was born in Brimfield, Massachusetts, the son of Morris Burke Belknap the elder (1780–1877) and Phoebe Locke Thompson Belknap (1788–1873) and is not to be confused with William Burke Belknap the younger (1885–1965) or William Burke Belknap Jr. The elder William Burke Belknap [2] started the company on the banks of the Ohio River in 1840. His father Morris Burke Belknap the elder [3] had earlier developed iron foundries and other related businesses in Massachusetts which influenced his son's founding of the Belknap Hardware and Manufacturing Company. [4] [5] Morris Burke Belknap (1856–1910), also known as Morris B. Belknap or Col. Morris Belknap, was a vice president of Belknap Hardware. and was married to Lily Buckner., the daughter of Simon Bolivar Buckner.
Belknap Hardware's fame spread and the company was represented at the 8th Annual Convention of the Panhandle Hardware and Implement Association in Amarillo, Texas. [6] The Belknaps figured prominently in the history of the Pendennis Club of Louisville, the first club house of which, in 1848, was a former Belknap family mansion. After 50 years, Belknap Hardware was acclaimed in the Atlanta Constitution as one of the South's great industries. [7] The company was praised in newspaper advertising by Southern Bell Telephone and Telegraph Company as an exemplary business user of the long distance telephone. [8] By its 100th anniversary in 1940, Belknap Hardware had grown to a landmark complex of 37 buildings, covering 37 acres of floor space under one roof. The building had a network of underground passageways and covered bridges. The warehouse space alone at 129-133 N. Second Street (a building which no longer exists) was eight stories tall. [9]
The company became one of the nation's largest wholesale enterprises with nationally known quality brands, among which Blue Grass was the most readily recognizable. John Primble knives, developed by an employee of the company, became a Belknap brand with its own division, made in Louisville between 1947 and 1985 by the John Primble Belknap Hardware Co. [10] [11] The Crusader manufacturing brand of Belknap included contractors' shovels, hammers, hatchets, axes, drawing knives, carpenters' pincers, planes, screw drivers, hand drills, wrecking bars, bit braces, auger bits, chisels, pliers, wrenches, tin snips, and tin ceilings. [12] [13] Other popular Belknap manufactured products included rifles, guns, padlocks, lawn mowers, and bicycles. Belknap inventory in the vast warehouse spaces grew larger and larger, and the Belknap neon sign could be seen from miles away. [14]
The company was founded by Belknaps and managed predominantly by members of the Belknap family and their chosen successors until its demise in 1986 when, after over 140 years, it faced bankruptcy and was sold. Terrence Gallaher, editor-in-chief of Hardware Age said, "In the late '70's, Belknap's Board of Directors came to include a number of outsiders, men who weren't also company officers . . . . The new board saw an opportunity to appoint someone from outside as president. Up to that time, Belknap promoted top officers from within, and virtually all the men in top management had begun their careers on the road, carrying a catalog." [15]
The closing of Belknap has been called a tragedy of errors. [16] As early as 1909, the hardware company management sued a newspaper which incorrectly announced that Belknap Hardware was bankrupt. [17] The company was also known as W. B. Belknap from 1840 to 1860, W. B. Belknap & Co. from 1860 to 1880, W. B. Belknap and Co. Inc. from 1880 to 1907, and Belknap Hardware & Mfg. Co. from 1907 to 1986. [18] [19]
On July 23, 1968, the Louisville Courier-Journal carried the Associated Press, Dow Jones, and other special dispatches' news that Belknap Hardware and Manufacturing Company was changing its name to simply "Belknap, Inc." The company had not yet gone out of business, but the stockholders the day before approved the change of the name, reasoning that since no abbreviations of firm names were permitted under the new U.S. Fair Packaging and Labeling Act, the full name of the company would be hard to inscribe on small tools. The company's proxy statement explained that Belknap had not "conducted any manufacturing operation for many years," and that it carried much merchandise that was not hardware. Although not a manufacturer at that time, Belknap was still distributing items made for it "by other manufacturers under at least nine Belknap trade names." [20]
In 1923, the Belknap Hardware and Manufacturing Building was built at 101-23 East Main Street in Louisville's General Business District on the site of the second Galt House. It was designed by the architectural firm of Graham, Anderson, Probst, and White of Chicago and at the time it was "the largest single-unit hardware plant in the world. . . .". For a while the building was the location of the Presbyterian denomination's National Headquarters and is now known as the Waterside Building and is occupied by the Humana Corporation. [21]
Photographs of the actual demolition by explosion of a defunct Belknap building were used as promotional preview advertising for the 1993 film, Demolition Man .[ citation needed ]
The Heyburn Building, on the National Historic Register since 1979, until 1955 was the tallest building in Kentucky. It was completed in 1928 and named for William R. Heyburn, a former president of Belknap Hardware and Manufacturing Company. This skyscraper's height was surpassed as the result of an addition to the top of the now defunct Commonwealth Building, which was imploded in 1994.
A former home of members of the William Richardson Belknap (1849–1914) family, [22] Lincliff, [23] was owned by detective fiction writer Sue Grafton and her husband Stephen F. Humphrey and is on the National Historic Register.
Belknap may refer to:
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Since it earliest days, the economy of Louisville, Kentucky, has been underpinned by the shipping and cargo industries. Today, Louisville, Kentucky is home to dozens of companies and organizations across several industrial classifications.
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Lincliff is a Georgian Revival house in Glenview near Louisville, Kentucky, United States, built in the early 1910s by William Richardson Belknap.
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Belknap or Belnap is a surname of Norman origin from England that may come from the Anglo-Norman words "belle," meaning beautiful, and "knap," meaning the crest or summit of a small hill. Although today the "k" in Belknap is generally silent as in the words "knight" or "knee," it is evident from documents dating from the Middle English period that it was originally pronounced as a hard "k." The surname is relatively infrequent, and most Belknaps or Belnaps in America are thought to descend from one man, Abraham Belknap, who migrated from Sawbridgeworth, Hertfordshire, England to Lynn, Massachusetts, about 1635. The surname continued in England. Today, a wide variety of locations and institutions are named Belknap or Belnap, all of which are believed to be connected in some manner to this early Puritan emigrant to America. Places named Belknap or Belnap include over 130 streets, approximately 20 towns, and 1 U.S. county. Natural features named Belknap range from a nunatak near the South Pole in Antarctica, to a Canadian cape near the North Pole, to a seamount beneath the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii, to a tiny rocky island in Indonesia in Southeast Asia.
The Simmons Hardware Company was a hardware manufacturer based in St. Louis with locations in six states.
The North Brothers Manufacturing Company was an American manufacturer based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania that specialized in the making of hand tools, small appliances and some specialized power tools. They were family owned and operated for over 60 years before being acquired by the Stanley Works in 1946. They are probably most well known for their line of tools, particularly the "Yankee" brand of ratcheting screwdrivers.
William Burke Belknap the younger (1885–1965) was the son of William Richardson Belknap and Alice Trumbull Silliman. He was an entrepreneur in the family of William Burke Belknap, the elder (1811–1884), son of Morris Burke Belknap of Brimfield, Massachusetts, who was engaged in the iron furnace industry and died in 1873. The Belknaps were founders, inventors of patented merchandise, and owners of the Belknap Hardware and Manufacturing Company in Louisville, Kentucky. William Burke Belknap was an economist and a professor of economics at the University of Louisville. Leading up to and during World War II, he volunteered for service with the Red Cross in Ramsay and Plymouth, England. He was a trustee of Berea College and a graduate of Yale and Harvard. As a Kentucky legislator, he served two terms as a representative in the Kentucky General Assembly. He was the owner of Land O'Goshen Farms, where he bred and raised sheep and American saddlebred horses, and he was the president of F.C. Co-operative Milk Producers Association.
Morris Burke Belknap, also known as Colonel Morris Burke Belknap, was an American businessman from Louisville, Kentucky, and the Republican nominee for Governor of Kentucky in 1903. After earning a degree from the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale University, he worked at his father's hardware company. Later, he co-founded an agricultural implement company. In 1883, he married Lily Buckner, with whom he fathered four children. Following the death of his father, Belknap became vice-president of his hardware company, a position which he held for the rest of his life. Lily Buckner Belknap died in 1893, and he married Marion S. Dumont in 1900.
William Richardson Belknap, for 28 years was president of the Belknap Hardware and Manufacturing Company based in Louisville, Kentucky, one of the largest hardware American manufacturing companies and wholesale hardware companies of its time.
Morris Burke Belknap was an early iron foundry owner and American industrialist and "one of the pioneers in development of the iron industry west of the Allegheny Mountains." His son, W. B. Belknap, was founder of the Belknap Hardware and Manufacturing Company, having learned about the business from his father.
W. B. Belknap, also known as William Burke Belknap (the elder) (1811–1889), not to be confused with his grandson William Burke Belknap (the younger) (1885–1965) or great-grandson William Burke Belknap Jr. (1893–1952), was the founder of W .B. Belknap and Company, an early iron and nail business at Third and Main Street in downtown Louisville, Kentucky, which evolved by 1840 into the mammoth Belknap Hardware and Manufacturing Company. He was born in Brimfield, Massachusetts, where he spent his early years helping his father Morris Burke Belknap (the elder) (1780–1877) in an iron furnace foundry business.
Abraham Belknap (1589/90-1643), of Salem, Massachusetts, not to be confused with his grandson also named Abraham, was born in England. He was one of the first settlers of New England, and all living people with the surname Belknap, Belnap, or Beltoft, are thought to be descendants of him and his wife Mary Stallion.
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