All About Pocket Knives

As I do occasionally, I was surfing through old photos on EBAY last week, not looking for anything particular, just something interesting. I was in a seller's store who has tens of thousands of mid-20th-Century color slides for sale, mostly Kodachrome. At one point, I came across a slide (the "Reinspection" image below) of a woman sitting at a factory work station with a pile of pocket knives. After several days of lazily searching through thousands more offered by the seller, I was able to find 10 slides total of workers at the factory. I bought them all. They are all red border Kodachrome slides from the 1950s. They appear to have been taken by the same photographer and perhaps on the same day. In one of the images, a woman ("Sharpening" image) has a December 1955 calendar above her work station, which dovetails perfectly with the style of these particular red border Kodachrome slide mounts.

Unfortunately, there was no indication of the company name in the first 8 slides I found. But I think good fortune smiled with the last two slides, the two "Final Hafting" images. In the first, the man appears to perhaps be working on Camillus 23s. In the last, there is a sign on a wall above some male workers. Unfortunately, a pipe bisects the sign, but on it you can see that there is a word that appears to begin with a capital "C" and ends in "us". The word underneath appears to end in "dge!". This would fit nicely with the Camillus slogan, "Camillus has the edge!" So, I believe that these images are from the Camillus factory, c. 1955. When I received them from the seller I found that back in the day someone had annotated each mount with the job being performed.

Fortunately, the color on these has held up beautifully and required no restoration or tweaking in making the scans. Below are the images, listed with the annotations. My second post will be of cropped areas of some of the images.

I have also posted this in Orvet's Nuggets of Camillus History thread in the AAPK Camillus forum.

Thanks for looking,

Chris J.

Crops from the above posted images.

Chris J.

Great fine Chris. Thank you so much for sharing those.

Wow, I love seeing those!
I have toured the Bear and Son knife factory, and itbis amazing how much has not changed in knifemaking! Hafting and polishing still has to be done on some very similar equipment.
Thank you for preserving a bit of history!!

Very nice photos! Thank you for taking the time to share some knife history with us here at AAPK. The cropped pics sure are cool .

Thanks, Chris, great to see!

Great buys.

What do you suppose is written across the top of the sign?

I get the sense it's a safety warning or encouragement sign. Such signs were all over the foundry in which I worked, cica 1965-1967.

Chris that was really a treat! Thanks for sharing these with us.
Froe

This is a very informative post, Chris. Thanks!

Thanks, guys, I appreciate your kind comments.

Chris J.

RobesonsRme.com wrote: ↑Sun Jun 14, 2026 1:42 am Great buys.

What do you suppose is written across the top of the sign?

I get the sense it's a safety warning or encouragement sign. Such signs were all over the foundry in which I worked, cica 1965-1967.

The first letter of the underlined portion is "T". I think that the next letter may be an "H" or maybe a "W". The last word on the right of the pipe may be "SAY". There's definitely an "A" and there is just a hint to me to me that the next letter could be a 'Y". So, the sign might say "TH (TW)- - - SAY Camillus has the edge!" I'll have to do some online searching to see if I can find the sign pictured somewhere else.

Chris J.

Thanks for posting this. Kodachrome was certainly a marvel.

Bob

Super cool pictures! Thanks for posting them

Super cool pictures! Thanks for posting them

You're welcome, rea1eye and AB. Yes, that mid-century Kodachrome is great stuff.

Chris J.

Thanks, Chris.

1967redrider wrote: ↑Mon Jun 15, 2026 3:04 am Thanks, Chris.

You're welcome, John. Thank you.

Chris J.

I was looking over these images again. Note that the woman's calendar in the "Sharpening" image is December 1955 and outside her windows there appears to be snow on the ground. It appears that there could be snow outside the windows in the "Reinspection" image and "Assembly" image with the plaid shirt lady. I point these out--that there's snow on the ground and it's the month of December in upstate New York--because everyone in all of these images has either short sleeves or long sleeves rolled short above the elbow. This being a factory, I'm sure that in the winter this building wasn't an overly warm, snug environment, so why the universal short sleeves.

Was this a safety measure because of the machines?

Chris J.