The two great deeds in kind: a company's memory, and a mansion

1966 — the Studebaker deed; the 1970s or 1988 — the Copshaholm gift

The Studebaker deed: When Studebaker ended automobile production in 1966, the company gave the City of South Bend the two things it had kept longest: its vehicle collection — begun by Clement Studebaker in the nineteenth century, holding the carriages of presidents and the family's own Conestoga wagon — and its corporate archives, some 70 tons of paper reaching back to the 1860s. The city agreed to provide the collection a suitable home; it is today the core of the Studebaker National Museum, opened beside The History Museum in 2005. The collection's count at the deed is printed as the record gives it — 33 vehicles in the museum's published visitor account, 37 in its archivist's telling — and no value was placed on the gift in any source reached, so none is printed: in scale of consequence it is the largest single gift ever made to the city itself.

Copshaholm: The Oliver mansion followed the same road a generation later. Copshaholm, Joseph D. Oliver's 38-room house on West Washington Street, passed at his widow Anna's death in 1938 to their four children, and came at last to the Northern Indiana Historical Society — The History Museum — with its contents. The date of that gift is a printed conflict this history carries from the Wealth section: the National Register documentation says the house and contents were donated "in the 1970s," while the museum's own account dates the gift to 1988, after the last of the four children, Gertrude Oliver Cunningham, died in 1987. Both stand. Together the two deeds gave South Bend the substance of its two museums — the industrial collection and the industrialist's house — at no documented price.

Sources:

1. Studebaker National Museum — the museum's own history (the 1966 gift of the collection and archives to the City of South Bend); Hemmings, from the museum's archivist — the collection's extent and the archives' 70 tons.
2. The Wealth section of this history — the Copshaholm descent and the divided date of its gift, from the National Register documentation and The History Museum's account.