The Ancestors: Threshers and Steam Traction — Regional Works, Township Silence

Row 3 · Steam-age predecessors, in two parts

Lead: Part one — the region built the tractor's ancestors in force. The nearest great house is Advance-Rumely of La Porte, one county west: Meinrad Rumely's foundry, begun at La Porte in 1853, was producing corn shellers and complete threshing machines by 1859, added steam traction engines in 1895, and in 1910 launched the kerosene OilPull, the internal-combustion heir of the steam engine; the 1915 Advance-Rumely combination of the Rumely and Advance Thresher companies made La Porte one of the largest thresher works in America before Allis-Chalmers bought it in 1931. Nichols and Shepard of Battle Creek, the 1929 merger's fourth leg, likewise built threshers and steam engines. Steam-age power, in other words, was manufactured all around Olive Township — at La Porte, at South Bend for plows, at Battle Creek — and threshing rings and steam engines worked the township's harvests as customers, not as a home industry.

Part two — the township's own record splits off cleanly, and the split is a searched negative. Chapman and Howard's 1880 county history and the Olive Township material in the 1875 illustrated atlas of St. Joseph County were the named instruments for a township works: neither the atlas's New Carlisle / Olive Township sketches nor the directory record banked by this build names a threshing-machine works, a steam-traction works, a foundry or an engine shop seated in New Carlisle or Olive Township. The township enters the steam age as a market — farms, a grain trade, implement dealers by 1903 — and not as a maker. Printed at that size: the ancestors existed, regionally; on this ground, the search for a works returns nothing, and that nothing is the finding.

Sources:

1. Advance-Rumely company record: founded La Porte, 1853; threshers by 1859; steam traction from 1895; OilPull launched 1910; Allis-Chalmers purchase, 1931. TractorData marque history to the same effect.
2. Higgins, Belden & Co., An Illustrated Historical Atlas of St. Joseph Co., Indiana (1875), Olive Township / New Carlisle sketches — no works named.
3. Chapman (1880) St. Joseph County history, Olive Township chapter — searched as named instrument; no threshing or traction works for the township returned in the reachable record.