The industrial families: art at the carriage house

1889 – 1988 · the Oliver and Studebaker patronage

Two houses: The wealth that built South Bend's factories also built its two great houses, and both houses ended as the city's art addresses. Copshaholm, the Oliver mansion on West Washington Street, was the seat of the plow family; Tippecanoe Place was Clement Studebaker's. The houses' architecture stands in Architecture and their museum courses in Museums; what belongs to this section is what the families' money did for the arts system around them. The Studebaker company's own collection of carriages and automobiles — assembled by the firm itself across its wagon and car years — came to the city as a gift in 1966, the year the company ended, and stands today at the heart of the Studebaker National Museum. The Oliver house went the slower road of a family gift: the home and its contents were donated to the forerunner of today's History Museum under an arrangement made in the 1970s and completed when the family's tenure ended — Gertrude Oliver, the last of J. D. Oliver's children, died in 1987, and the museum's acquisition is dated 1988, the house passing with its furnishings in place, down to the contents of its rooms.

The carriage house: The point where the industrial patronage touches the living city most directly is smaller than either mansion. When Carlotta Banta's bequest founded the South Bend Art Center in 1947, the center's first home was the carriage house at Copshaholm — the Oliver family's outbuilding, a mile and a half from where the museum sits now. The city's first art school thus opened in the plow king's carriage house, on a kindergarten teacher's savings, under a roof the Oliver money had built: the two founding fortunes of the system, the industrial and the schoolteacher's, met in one building. The center moved to Century Center in 1977, but the pattern the carriage house set — industrial ground, civic tenant, public teaching — is the pattern the whole system still runs on, from the university galleries in the Notre Dame CDP to the dance studios in the old Colfax School.

Sources:

2. South Bend Museum of Art, "About" and "Becoming SBMA" (southbendart.org) — the Art Center's first home in the carriage house at Copshaholm, the Oliver mansion, and the 1977 move to Century Center.