James Oliver and Harvey Little — the foundry quarter-shares

the foundry bought May 1855 · the patent 30 June 1857

The founding, shared: James Oliver was born 28 August 1823 at Newcastleton, Scotland, and came to America with his family in 1835. He learned iron work in Indiana, and in May 1855 he and a fellow molder, Harvey Little, each bought a one-fourth interest in a small South Bend foundry that cast iron plows. Six weeks later the St. Joseph River flooded the works; Oliver and Little rebuilt, reopened in November 1855, bought out the remaining interest, and traded as the South Bend Iron Company. The firm's fortune was a casting trick, and the patent record shares it as the founding was shared: the foundational chilled-plow patent, Letters Patent No. 17,694 of 30 June 1857, names James Oliver and Harvey Little — the improvement in chilling plow shares by which the share's soil face froze into a hard, glassy skin that polished itself clean in the sticky prairie soils where ordinary cast-iron plows clogged and dragged. Popular accounts credit Oliver alone; the patent names both men, and this section prints the patent.

The run, and the partner who fades: The business was incorporated as the South Bend Iron Works on 22 July 1868; sales ran from about 1,000 plows in 1864 to 17,000 a year in 1874, and in 1876 the company opened its great plant on the Perkins Farm on Chapin Street — thirty-two acres, five buildings, planned for 400 men. James Oliver remained the works' head until his death in 1908, when the presidency passed to his son (next entry). Of Harvey Little, the record reached for this history carries the founding and the patent and little more: the co-founder of the city's second great house has no separate documented run, and that thinness is printed as it stands.

Sources:

1. Businesses — "Oliver Chilled Plow Works" (the May 1855 quarter-interest purchase by Oliver and Little, the flood and rebuilding, the South Bend Iron Company, the incorporation of 22 July 1868, the sales series, the Chapin Street plant of 1876).
2. Inventors & Inventions — the foundational patent as a joint patent: Letters Patent No. 17,694 (30 June 1857) naming James Oliver and Harvey Little.
3. Notable People — "The Olivers: the plow, the presidency, and Copshaholm" (Oliver's birth and death, the patent, the 1868 incorporation).