The implement record in the tractor age: the plows the tractors pulled

1910 – 1985

The works that armed the tractor: By 1910, on the company record carried in the standard Oliver history, the Oliver Chilled Plow Works was "manufacturing a wide variety of farm tillage implements in addition to the chilled plow," and bought over 40,000 tons of pig iron in that year alone. Its tractor-age course runs through three documented facts. It built Plant No. 2 in the World War I years to make tractor plows for the Fordson, as sole producer, on the company-history account carried in the Chilled Plow Tractor entry above. It entered the 1929 merger as the merged company's plow works and remained so: after the merger the South Bend plant — Factory No. 1 — was the implement side of a company whose tractors were built in Iowa, so that for two generations the plows and tillage tools behind Oliver tractors were substantially South Bend work, shipped to be sold with Charles City machines. And it outlasted the tractor line itself: White Motor, which had bought Oliver in 1960, shut the original Oliver Chilled Plow Works factory in 1985, nine years after the last Oliver tractor; the buildings stood vacant until most were demolished in 2002, and the powerhouse was restored and is occupied by Rose Brick & Material. The Businesses record owns the company's corporate course across these years; the implement point is this section's: the tractor age did not end South Bend's implement industry — it re-specialized it, from the horse's plow to the tractor's.

The second plow works leaves the age early: The South Bend Chilled Plow Company — the Knoblock brothers' company, maker of the world-famed Casaday three-wheel sulky plow — was sold to the Vulcan Plow Company of Evansville on 17 February 1925, the South Bend Tribune reporting the sale of the finished and unfinished stock, the goodwill, the trade name, the patterns, jigs, tools, and dies, on an inventory basis, and expressly not the real estate. Its sulky and gang plows were horse-age tools, and its sale five years into the tractor age left Oliver, in the History Museum's words, "once again, the sole manufacturer of chilled plows in South Bend." The Business Gaps record owns that company's whole course; it is printed here at the size the tractor record needs: the city's four chilled-plow companies of the horse age were one by 1925, and the one was the works that armed the Fordson.

The rest of the implement bench, at the sizes their records give: The Bissell and Economist chilled-plow works never passed the directory threshold — Farr's 1883 listings are their whole documented size, neither appears in Howard's 1907 history, and their courses are untraced; the Business Gaps record owns them at that size, and neither has any documented tractor-age course. Birdsell's clover huller — the machine that threshed, hulled, and cleaned clover seed in one operation, made on South Columbia Street from the 1860s — was the threshing rig's stationary half built in this city, a steam-and-horse-age machine whose company record the Businesses section owns whole. The Bowsher company's feed mills (1882 to about 1970, in Business Gaps) ground feed under stationary power across the whole tractor age without ever making a tractor implement line that the record reached names. Sibley Machine, cutting metal at 127 East Sample Street from 1874 to the present, is the bench's survivor, and its record is likewise owned elsewhere. The implement story the tractor changed is therefore a one-works story in this city: Oliver's.

Sources:

1. The standard Oliver company record (Wikipedia, citing Wendel's Oliver Hart-Parr) — the wide tillage variety by 1910 and the 40,000 tons of pig iron; White's 1985 shutdown of Factory No. 1, the 2002 demolition, and the restored powerhouse.
2. The History Museum, South Bend — its South Bend Chilled Plow Company account, carrying the South Bend Tribune of 17 February 1925 on the Vulcan Plow sale and its inventory-basis terms.
3. this history — the South Bend Chilled Plow Company's whole course; Bissell and Economist at directory size; Bowsher's feed mills; Sibley Machine — owned there, pointed to here.
4. Businesses — the Oliver corporate course and the Birdsell Manufacturing Company's whole record, owned there.