It depends on what you are talking about, there are really two different types of photo production -- for publication and fine art print. Back in the day, more people used the fine art print "workflow" and the publication workflow was mainly just for people who worked at newspapers, magazine or made reproduction prints. Today, essentially everyone is working in the production workflow and fewer people in the art print workflow. Note, I've a newspaper technical background, so some of what I'll say is colored by that.
Fine Art Print:
This is also the basis of all of the other workflows (except maybe where folks were reproducing slides, I'm a little fuzzy on early color reproduction -- I've never worked at a newspaper that did many color pictures before computers). This is your basic darkroom photography, where you projected the film onto a sheet of light sensitive paper and then ran it through a couple of chemical/water baths.
For black and white work you either stocked papers with different contrast curves or used variable contrast paper that changed contrast depending on the color of light used to expose it (so you had to stock those filters). The nice thing about VC paper is that you could have different contrast curves in different parts of the image by masking the image (physically, with cardboard or something!) and exposing different parts of the image with different filters. Dodging and burning were literal, using more cardboard or little tools to either hold light back from part of the image or give extra light. All other retouching would be with a paintbrush or airbrush -- although some people would actually work on the negative itself.
For color work (and again, I don't have much experience here) color temperature would be corrected by colored filters. You would need quite a few and it was very tedious to get things right.
Publication:
Two ways to go here. For black and white work, you could cover a sheet of high-contrast paper with a screen with little gaussian dots in it. This would change the artwork into a series of dots -- larger dots for the dark areas and smaller dots for the lighter areas. These images would be worked into a paper representation of the page and then shot on a very large camera which would produce a piece of film the size of the page. The negative would then be burned onto a printing plate. We are talking 50s-60s technology or so.
For color work, you would still start with a print still (if memory serves) but you would photograph it several times using different filters on the camera to get cyan, magenta, yellow and black "separations".
Hopefully this explanation isn't too far off or confusing, but the process was a lot more difficult, involved smelly chemicals, dark rooms and was hard to reverse. And I feel very old just knowing all this :-)
For a more in depth look at this (especially from a black and white standpoint) I recommend Ansel Adams' book "The Print".