What a delight to leaf through the pages of this issue of Owensboro Living magazine to read about so many of the family businesses that contribute so much to our community. All of these enterprises were created with the highest hopes of success, and there can be no greater measure of success than the idea of passing the business down to the next generation.
A special edition of the Messenger-Inquirer from a century ago – May 29, 1924 – spotlighted numerous businesses that were thriving at that time. Only a few of those remain in operation today, but all of them, in their own way and at their own time, helped to make our hometown what it is today.
One hundred years ago, readers of the day contemplated a detailed pen and ink drawing of “Owensboro of Tomorrow,” as revealed by a mythological figure representing “Progress” as she pulled back the curtain of fate. There, in the optimistic future, laid a bustling metropolis marked by numerous smokestacks from factories and industries along the riverfront, with church steeples rising in the background as crowded rooftops of homes faded into the distance, giving way to rolling hills of fertile farmland. A paddlewheeler, proudly carrying the name “Owensboro,” made its way down the Ohio River, passing a bridge stretching from Kentucky to Indiana – a bridge that would not exist in reality for another 16 years.
For the next 96 pages (!), every possible aspect of life in Owensboro is explored in language that captures every positive superlative imaginable.
In the area of manufacturing alone, Owensboro is celebrated for producing the following “articles and commodities:
“Buggies and light delivery wagons, automobile bodies, wheels and forgings for pleasure and light vehicles, farm and log wagons, gray castings, self-contained flour and corn mills, ditchers and graders, portable vises, chairs for home and office structure iron fabrication, sewer pipe, brick and drain tile, stock and poultry feeds, wheat and corn products, canned food products, smoking and chewing tobacco, cigars, electric lamps, leaf tobacco redrying, lumber flooring, meat products, harness and leather goods, concrete building blocks, machine plies, stone and marble cutting.”
Whew.
Among the many family-owned businesses featured in this anthology are the haberdashery of A. Graf and Son, selling dry goods and shoes, established in 1890 and operated by August and William Graf. Their advertisement proudly boasted their commitment of “Facts Always, Truth Only.”
Likewise, C.P. Clark & Sons, which opened their doors in 1897, was proud of their history as “pioneers in the farm implement and harness business.”
A greenhouse, nursery and retail business owned by J.A. Tapscott, his wife and son, was blooming, finding particular success with sales of potted plants and cut flowers, including carnations and chrysanthemums. Already that year, they had shipped five carloads of canna and dahlia bulbs across the central United States.
Also working with their hands, but in a very different way, Drs. Eula and J.J. Ketchum offered their work in the area of chiropractic medicine. “Our work,” their ad proclaimed, “is with the hands, the human spine and the power within.”
Levy’s – established in 1872 by M. Levy, and now managed, 52 years later in 1924, by his two sons and a daughter – continued to do a thriving business in downtown Owensboro as “an exclusive shop for better dressers.”
But not many businessmen, then or now, could walk in the footsteps of J.W. Gipe, who took over his father’s shoe repair business and was now involving a third generation in his son. Gipe estimated that he had half-soled a quarter of a million pairs of shoes, equating to 37,000,000 stitches at an average of 300 stitches per pair.
Page after page, year after year – family after family dedicated themselves to their trades. Whether one can look back from the vantage point of 2024 and declare any of them as successes is irrelevant. The important thing is, these families did the work they loved, contributing each in their own small ways to the greater good of our community.
Perhaps it is best to close with the words of W.T. Brown, who conducted his business in partnership with Delbert J. Glenn: “A man’s name may mean everything or nothing; it depends entirely upon how the owner has used it. The name of a business is equally dependent upon the way the owners conduct it.”
May the name of every business represented in this issue reflect the pride, integrity and commitment to excellence of its owners. OL
