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born 20 August 1850 · president 1908 – 1929 · died 6 August 1933
The founder and the heir, distinguished: Joseph Doty Oliver was the marketer to his father's inventor, in the family historian's pairing. He was born 20 August 1850 at Mishawaka, while the family still lived there, and began work in his father's firm at fourteen, cutting threads on nuts for seventy-five cents a day — a job he told a Tribune reporter in 1913 he had dreaded. George Milburn hired him as a bookkeeper on 1 July 1867, and he rose through the firm he would lead. On his father's death in 1908 he became president of the Oliver Chilled Plow Works, and he carried it for twenty-one years, to the merger that created the Oliver Farm Equipment Company on 1 April 1929 — the plow house his father founded leaving the family's hands as a constituent of a combine, with J. D. Oliver's presidency its last.
The house on Washington Avenue: In 1895–96, on the block at Washington and Chapin he had bought in 1894, J. D. Oliver built Copshaholm — 38 rooms, designed by the New York firm of Lamb & Rich, built of Indiana fieldstone cut on site by masons brought from Europe, named for his father's Scottish birthplace, and among the first houses in South Bend with electric light, powered from the plow works. He died at Copshaholm on 6 August 1933; his wife Anna died in 1938. The house and its gift to the museum are the Architecture and Wealth sections'; his size here is the twenty-one-year presidency that took the founder's works to its merger.
Sources:
- Notable People — "The Olivers" (the founder/heir pairing; the thread-cutting at fourteen and the 1913 Tribune interview; the bookkeeper's hiring of 1 July 1867; the presidency from 1908 and the merger of 1 April 1929; Copshaholm's building, 1895–96; the death at Copshaholm, 6 August 1933).
- Businesses — "Oliver Chilled Plow Works" (the firm's course to 1985, cross-referenced).