Fred Knapp was one of Brookville’s early photographers and documented thousands of local people and scenes over a long career. When he died in 1948, Brookville newspaper editor, H. E. “Pud” McMurray, heard that Knapp’s surviving negatives, many of which were on glass plates, had been taken to the dump. He went out and literally picked them off the piles, and because of his action, we still have hundreds of the Knapp negatives.
My great friend, the late Bill Snyder, and I studied many of the Knapp negatives and agreed that the above photograph is among his very best images. It shows the Main Street storefront now occupied by Pink Missies, at 164 Main Street.
An early Laurel Festival booklet reprinted the picture and identified the individuals as L. A. Leathers, his very young son, Frank, Edward Steele, and two unidentified individuals. The business was called the Enterprise Store. The photo dates from the early nineteen-teens.
Contributed by David Taylor