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BOUNDARY-PRINTED · SOUTH BEND'S WHOLE
The works a reader reaches for first are not this ground's, and what they made is not a tractor: the Oliver works stood in South Bend and made the chilled plow — 1,500 plows a year by 1871, 17,000 a year by 1874, a 58-acre plant by James Oliver's death in 1908 — together with the tillage implements a tractor pulls. The marque histories are unanimous on the division of labour the 1929 merger created: South Bend contributed plows and tillage, Charles City contributed the tractor, and corporate offices sat in Chicago while the plants stayed where they stood. So an "Oliver tractor" of 1935 or 1955 is, for this build's purposes, an Iowa tractor wearing a South Bend plow name — the after-1929 pattern, printed so no reader seats it here or even in its namesake city. The same discipline governs the county's other famous names: the Studebaker works built wagons and then automobiles and trucks, never farm tractors, and belong to South Bend's build whole. Granger's own sentence in the older record is the one the People leg prints — a settler breaking prairie where the Oliver shops would stand — which is to say, in South Bend. What stood on this ground was the demand side of that industry: farms that bought the plows, and later the Charles City tractors, through the trade carried in the trade article below.
Sources:
- Oliver Farm Equipment Company record and Oliver Heritage history, as cited above — the South Bend plant's plow production figures and the merger's plant geography.