William Burke Belknap

William Burke Belknap the younger (1885-1965) was an entrepreneur in the family of William Burke Belknap, the older (1811-1884), son of Morris B. Belknap, of the no longer extant Belknap Hardware Company in Louisville, Kentucky. Belknap Hardware Company was once called the "largest hardware company in the world." Belknap Hardware Company was a major manufacturer and retailer of hardware based on the banks of the Ohio River. The company faced many organizational and industrial challenges during its more than a century of operation, which ended in 1986. The company was said to have a "family" approach with its employees and their dependents. Their products bore labels of their famous house brands, one of the most well-known of which was the Blue Grass brand.

The Belknap family once resided in a home in Louisville which eventually became the club house for the Pendennis Club. Family documents and history are found in the archives of the Filson Club. The Belknap Building, formerly the Belknap Elementary School, is on the National Historic Register, it was a  school built with funds from the city's first million dollar bond issue. The school opened in 1916, two years after the death of William Richardson Belknap (1849-1914. The school closed in 1978. The Belknaps were civic minded and generous. They donated a parcel of land to the University of Louisville, intended to be the future campus. When the building bond failed the land was sold on April 2, 1923.

An urban neighborhood of historic Louisville homes is found in Belknap, Louisville, a section three and a half miles east of downtown Louisville, Kentucky, USA. The neighborhood, bounded by by Bardstown Road, Douglass Boulevard, Dundee Road and Newburg Road, is part of a larger area of Louisville known as the Highlands. The Belknap neighborhood was acknowledged in Louisville Magazine in October 2010 to be one of the most livable and pleasant neighborhoods in Louisville and Jefferson County, Kentucky. In 2012, Belknap received a national award from Neighborhoods, USA, the first time a Kentucky neighborhood was recognized by this organization. The area of Belknap neighborhood was once farm land located two miles (3 km) south of where Bardstown Road (then Bardstown Turnpike) began at Highland Avenue. A stagecoach stop at Douglass Boulevard and Bardstown Road named the "Two-mile House" was frequented by Abraham Lincoln whenever he visited the James Breckenridge Speed family at Farmington.

A limited edition memoir of William Burke Belknap exists. He is related to William Richardson Belknap, Morris Burke Belknap, Eleanor Belknap Humphrey, Alice Humphrey Hawkes, Alice Humphrey Morgan, Gerald Morgan, Jr., Thomas M. Humphrey, Dr. Edward Cornelius Humphrey, Lewis Craig Humphrey, Sally Reed Humphrey, Edward Porter Humphrey, Barbara Morgan Meade and Teresa Cordova. William Burke Belknap and many others of his family are buried at Cave Hill Cemetery in Louisville, which was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979. Cave Hill National Cemetery, containing military graves, is also on the National Register, and was added in 1998.