Morris Burke Belknap (the elder)

Morris Burke Belknap (the elder) (June 25, 1780 -July 26, 1877) 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." In 1824 Morris married Phoebe Locke Thompson (1788-1873 and taught their son William Burke Belknap (1811-1889), also known as "William Burke Belknap, the elder, or W. B. Belknap," about the iron business. W. B. Belknap, the oldest of Morris and Phoebe's six children, by following his father's chosen industrial manufacturing and retail career became the founder of Belknap Hardware and Manufacturing Company in Louisville, Kentucky.

Morris Burke Belknap moved from Brimfield, Massachusetts in 1807 to a colony in Marietta, Ohio where he started an iron industry. In 1810 or 1811 he moved back East to Worcester, Massachusetts. In 1816 he moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he helped to build some of the first rolling mills and iron casting and iron forging companies. He traveled on horseback and by river boats, exploring the ore fields of the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers. and subsequently established iron furnaces in Stewart County, Tennessee and Nashville, Tennessee.

Morris Burke Belknap was born in South Brimfield, Massachusetts on June 25, 1780, the only son of a William Belknap who was the only son of Joseph Belknap (1769-1800) and Mary (Morris) Belknap. Morris Burke Belknap was the grandfather of William Richardson Belknap, president of Belknap Hardware and Manufacturing Company and the great-grandfather of genealogist and artist Eleanor Silliman Belknap Humphrey and her brother William Burke Belknap, the owner of Land o' Goshen Farms in Goshen, Kentucky. He was the great-great-grandfather of the TVA physician Edward Cornelius Humphrey and the great-great-great grandfather of economist Thomas M. Humphrey.

Morris Belknap's wife Phoebe died February 5, 1873 in DeWitt, Arkansas, and Morris died at Smithland, Livingston County, Kentucky on July 26, 1877. Kentucky historian E. Polk Johnson observed that Morris Burke Belknap's name "merits special prominence on the roster of those through whose constructive and initiative abilities was compassed the development of the great iron industry of the United States."