Belknap Hardware and Manufacturing Company

Located in Louisville, Kentucky, Belknap excelled both in catalog sales and widespread distribution of its own name-brand manufactured products.

[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.

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.

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 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.

"[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.

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.