B. 1903, D. 1985
The Benham name runs deep in American soil. Among the founding families of New Haven, Connecticut, the Benhams helped shape the earliest chapters of American colonial life. That spirit of purpose and pioneering carried forward through generations — and for us, was exemplified in our grandfather, Harvey Benham.
Harvey’s father was a physician who traded urban comforts for the frontier of the Oklahoma Territory, moving his family into a sod hut in order to provide early Oklahomans with medical care. It was a lesson in sacrifice and service that his son would carry quietly into his life.
Harvey went on to graduate from Purdue University in the mid 1920s with a degree in Horticulture. With an incisive and curious mind, he was a man equally at home in the natural world and the world of ideas. That combination took him far: Firestone Rubber Company sent him to Liberia, where he spent years establishing rubber plantations, managing hundreds of workers, contracting malaria, and watching the African jungle press back against every acre cleared. He spoke of those years often — the heat, the disputes among the workers, the strange wonder of then-exotic Africa.
After Africa, Harvey landed in New Orleans, where he married Evelyn, an artist, and tried his hand at real estate. When those investments turned against him, he did what Benhams have always done: he adapted. He moved his family to rural Mississippi and took up farming, raising five children who absorbed from that land something more valuable than comfort — resourcefulness, grit, and the quiet satisfaction of honest work. Each of them went on to build extraordinary lives.
For the Fisher brothers, Harvey was the man who took us fishing in lakes thick with water moccasins, who walked the plowed fields with us to find Indian arrowheads, who rolled his own smokes from Prince Albert tobacco — sometimes while driving back-country roads, drifting unknowingly into the ditch until we hollered, at which point he would ease the wheel back with a calm “oh dear” and drive on without missing a beat.
He was humble, unhurried, and unshakeable — old-school in the best sense. He didn’t lecture us. He led by example, let us figure things out, and trusted us to get there. He taught grace under pressure simply by living it, and quiet humor simply by being himself.
We named this knife to honor him. We think he would have put it to use every day. YES-SIR!!!
