Joseph Palmer Knapp

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Re: Joseph Palmer Knapp

andofcourse04 (Visualizza annunci) 

Inviato: 25 Ago 2012 09:44AM

JOSEPH PALMER KNAPP was born in Williamsburg Brooklyn NY May 14, 1864

Father: Joseph Fairchild Knapp 1832-1891. Mother: Phoebe Palmer Knapp 1839- 1908

Father was a partner of the lithograph firm Sarony Major & Knapp, Later Major & Knapp, Knapp Co. and a founding member & second president of Metropolitan Life Insurance

Mother wrote over 500 hymns including Blessed Assurance & Open The Gates Of The Temple

J P attended Wilson St School , Brooklyn Poly Tech & 1 year in 1881 at Columbia University.

Worked at father's firms of Major & Knapp & The Knapp Company and eventually purchased it from father in 1890 naming it the Joseph P Knapp Co in 1891

Married Sylvia Theresa Kepner in 1886 Two Children Were Born Of This Marriage : Claire Antoinette Knapp 1889 & Joseph Fairchild Knapp 1892.

Reputation grows as one of Americas top wing shots, fly fisherman, billiard player and golfer all through the late 1800's and well into the first decade of the new century.

1891 Became Partners with James B. Duke of NC in the NY Recorder Newspaper which Introduced COLOR to newspapers.

1892 Joins Metropolitan Life Insurance Board of Directors. Organized & Headed The First Printing Conglomerate AMERICAN LITHOGRAPHIC COMPANY (ALCO) 1892 - 1929. While heading ALCO helped develop many technological advances in printing and the use of Color printing including the Roto Gravure process. Took over publishing of Truth Magazine.

1894 Knapps become summer residents at Bellport LI NY. J P becomes one of the founders of the original Bellport Golf Course & Yacht Club.

1900 Became Partners With Thomas Lamont of J P Morgan Cp & renowned lawyer Samuel Unterneyer and starts publishing Associated Sunday Magazine THE FIRST SUNDAY NEWS MAGAZINE supplement offered to newspapers through the US.

1903 After a separation Sylvia T. Knapp intiiates divorce proceedings in Sioux Falls SD.

1905 Marries Elizabeth H Laing-McIlwaine In Sioux Falls SD.

1906 Purchases the Crowell Co that includes two magazines Farm & Fireside & Woman's Home Companion & a printing plant in Springfield Oh.

1907 Becomes partners with Myron C Taylor in a joint venture to supply Pre Printed Postage Envelopes to US Govt.

1911 Adds AMERICAN MAGAZINE to The Crowell Company

1912 Purchases and personally funds at times Mentor Magazine, a publication designed to educate. Ceases publication in 1929 with onset of depression.

1914 Starts publishing Everyweek Magazine, ceases publication due to paper shortages during WW1. Enables the mutualization of Metropolitan Life Insurance Company by selling them his stock.

1917 Contributes To The WW1 War Effort through publication of many posters including the Iconic Uncle Sam Wants You. Donates Land, Hangers, Radio Equipment & Seaplanes to US Navy at His Mastic LI Estate. Both his son and step son Archie McIlwaine become Naval Aviators during the war.

1918 Purchases Collier's Weekly Magazine

1919 Purchases Mackay Island in Currituck NC. from old family friend Thomas Dixon and starts to build The Knapp Lodge which becomes his winter home until 1946.

1921 Starts To Get Involved With Helping The Currituck School System which Became A Life Long Project and Beyond. Gives a large part of his fortune to this cause. 1922 Elizabeth McIllwaine Knapp dies at the Knapp Summer Home in Southampton LI.

1923 Marries Margaret Rutledge at the Knapp Lodge in Currituck NC.

1924 Purchases control of The Sea Sled Boat Co of Connecticut which builds over 6,000 unique high quality mahogony boats under Knapp ownership until 1934 when the depression halts production.

1929 Sells American Lithographic Co, but retains ALCO GRAVURE. Starts The Knapp Foundations in both NY and NC that fund many philanthropic activities in both education and conservation. Also forms the conservation organization More Game Birds In America which eventually morphs into Ducks Unlimited in 1937.

1933 Presents The KNAPP Plan to US Govt to help alleviate the hardships of the depression. Does much on local levels in both NC and NY to help people cope.

1936 Starts THIS WEEK Magazine another Sunday News Magazine.

1937 Becomes Chairman Of THe Board of Crowell - Collier.

1946 Retires from business at age 82. Becomes interested in helping the N C Institute Of Govt at UNC.

1951 At age 86 Joseph Palmer Knapp dies in his sleep on Jan 31,1951 at his Riverhouse Apt in NYC. 400 attend his memorial service at St Thomas Cathedral. His remains are buried in Moyock, NC near his island home. His widow Margaret continues his work with the Knapp Foundation including overseeing the construction of the Knapp Building at UNC Chapel Hill that houses the Institute Of Govt.

1960 Margaret R Knapp dies and is buried along side Joseph P Knapp. The Knapp Foundation continues on till this day doing good work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_P._Knapp

Joseph Palmer Knapp (May 14, 1864 – January 30, 1951) was an American publisher and philanthropist. Knapp has also been credited with the invention of the multi-color six-cylinder press.

He was the son of Joseph Fairchild and Phoebe Palmer Knapp. His father was a past president of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company and his mother was a hymn writer, credited with over 500 hymns, most notably "Blessed Assurance" with Fanny Crosby.

In 1891, Knapp founded American Lithograph Company, which became a leading printer of Sunday magazines for newspapers. (The company later became Publication Corporation, which eventually owned a number of Knapp publishing properties.)

Knapp published the Associated Sunday Magazine from 1903 to 1905.

In 1906, Knapp and partner George Hazen purchased the Crowell Publishing Company of Springfield, Ohio, incorporating it in New Jersey. Crowell published the family magazines Farm & Fireside and Woman's Home Companion.

Knapp's Every Week, published between 1915 and 1918, reached a circulation of more than 550,000.

Knapp was publisher of the New York Herald Tribune Sunday Magazine in 1935 when he changed its name and began to syndicate it to other newspapers as the Sunday supplement This Week. In the early 1950s, it accompanied 37 Sunday newspapers. (After Knapp's death, at its peak in 1963, This Week was distributed with the Sunday editions of 42 newspapers for a total circulation of 14.6 million.)

Philanthropy

Knapp was interested in game bird conservation, and in 1937 founded the More Game Birds in America Foundation (with others including J. P. Morgan), which today is known as Ducks Unlimited.

He contributed greatly to the Currituck County Schools in North Carolina and to the University of North Carolina. Currituck County dedicated one of their public schools to Knapp. This school is currently the J.P. Knapp Early College High School, which was founded in 2008.

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https://www.ncpedia.org/biography/knapp-joseph-palmer

Joseph Palmer Knapp, publisher, financier, philanthropist, and conservationist, was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., the son of Phoebe Palmer and Joseph Fairchild Knapp, a founder of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. He was educated at the Polytechnical Institute in Brooklyn and Columbia University, from which he was graduated in 1884.

A substantial inheritance left by his father enabled Knapp to invest in a variety of business ventures, primarily associated with printing and publishing. In 1895 he founded the American Lithographic Company, and was instrumental in developing a multicolor process that carried a sheet of paper over a number of cylinders, from each of which an impression was made in a different color. With control of this process he began printing the Associated Sunday Magazine in 1903, thus providing newspapers with their first weekly magazine supplement. For many years, as a principal stockholder and chairman of the board of the Crowell-Collier Publishing Company, he was the publisher of several of the nation's largest circulation magazines including Collier's The American Magazine, The Women's Home Companion, and Country Home. For most of his adult life he was a director of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, serving for many years as chairman of its finance committee.

Among the specialized printing jobs for which the multicolor presses of the American Lithographic Company were particularly well suited was the production of millions of small pictures of popular baseball players which were packaged with cigarettes. In this way he became associated with James B. Duke, founder of the American Tobacco Company, from whom Knapp gained considerable information about North Carolina. But duck hunting, not baseball, was the reason for his first trip to eastern North Carolina, and that initial visit to the Currituck area in 1916 marked the beginning of a long association between the New York financier and the sparsely populated coastal county of Currituck. Knapp soon purchased a hunting club and an island, Mackey Island, from author Thomas Dixon, and designed a spacious colonial home which was completed there in 1920. For many years he and his wife, the former Margaret Rutledge of Summit, Miss., spent part of each year in their River House apartment in the heart of New York City and the remainder on isolated Mackey Island in the middle of Currituck Sound.

Concerned about the lack of educational opportunities for the young people of the county, he offered to supplement whatever could be raised locally in order to bring about needed improvements. His first donation to the Currituck schools, in 1923, was for $50,000; until his death he continued to make annual contributions. With his assistance modern school buildings were constructed, together with comfortable houses for teachers as an inducement to attract capable instructors; school buses were purchased; teaching salaries were supplemented; and Currituck took the lead among North Carolina counties in providing textbooks and school lunches for all students, in employing school nurses and vocational teachers, and in extending the school term to nine months, setting an example for the state to follow later.

Knapp extended his largess to the people of Currituck County far beyond the public schools, employing agricultural experts to advise the farmers, furnishing credit for the operation of a Currituck Mutual Exchange through which farmers could finance their crops, and making substantial annual donations to the public welfare fund. In a published report in 1932, the clerk to the Currituck County Board of Commissioners said: "Mr. Knapp has given us more this year than we have paid in taxes."

In September 1947 Governor R. Gregg Cherry announced that Joseph Knapp, through his Knapp Foundation, Inc., had given a quarter of a million dollars to the state for a two-year survey of school needs and for fisheries research, projects the governor described as "a tribute to Joseph P. Knapp's lifelong interest in the betterment of mankind."

Ironically, Knapp's final, and possibly his most important, contribution to his adopted state did not reach fruition until after his death. This was the provision of funds, by the Knapp Foundation and at the insistence of his widow, for the construction of the Institute of Government building in Chapel Hill.

Knapp, the father of two children, Joseph Fairchild and Claire Knapp Dixon, was buried in Memorial Cemetery near Moyock in Currituck County.