Page 41 - Copshaholm Curriculum Book_2015

Oliver Family History 15

Board of Trustees, on which he had served for 18 years. He returned to his Oliver
Chilled Plow Works office February 11, 1924, where he remained active until the
business was sold.

The Downfall of the Oliver Chilled Plow Works and the Death of J.D.

The Oliver company in 1933 was facing increased competition from other full-line
farm implement companies and faced the choice of enormous expansion with a
program to include more implements, such as tractors, or joining together with other
manufacturers making different types of farm tools and organizing a full-line Oliver
company.

J.D. elected to join other manufacturers. At a special meeting of stockholders
February 1, 1929, he was authorized to organize a new company, to be known as the
Oliver Farm Equipment Company, and take over, along with the Oliver Chilled Plow
Works, the Hart-Parr Company of Charles City, Iowa, manufacturer of tractors. J.D.
also purchased the Nichols and Shepard Company of Battle Creek, Michigan, which
made threshing machines, corn pickers and combines. Soon after this merger
American Seeding Machine Company of Springfield, Ohio and the McKenzie Potato
Machinery Company of LaCrosse, Wisconsin, were acquired. The Oliver Chilled Plow
Works, as such, ceased to exist on March 30, 1929. The executive office posts of the
new Oliver Farm Equipment Company were divided among three of the merging
companies, with J.D. as chairman of the board, a post he held until resigning December
13, 1932.

J.D. Oliver died August 6, 1933 in Copshaholm, the home that he had moved
with his wife, Anna Gertrude, and their young family in 1897. He was 83 years old.

The Oliver Children

The children, James II, Ann Gertrude, Joseph Jr., and Susan Catherine, all of
whom had grown up in Copshaholm surrounded by the security of wealth, were well
educated and well instructed in Oliver family traditions. Of the four children, the oldest
and youngest were to deviate most from the Oliver norm.

James II, born November 3, 1885, was active and adventurous as a boy and
retained those characteristics as an adult. He attended Michigan Military Academy,
Preparatory School at Notre Dame, and had graduated from Phillips Academy in
Massachusetts in 1908. He was elected director of the Oliver Chilled Plow Works in
1908 at the age of 22 and held various other positions with the firm. August 16, 1920,
he married Louise Potter Yarrington, of Richmond, Virginia, daughter of an industrialist,
whom he had known for eight years. They never had children and remained free for
lengthy trips to Europe, where he indulged “in his passion for spending money and
purchasing paintings,” according to one report from that era.

Gertrude, the second Oliver child, was delicate, thoughtful, considerate, and
sensitive, qualities similar to those of her mother. She was destined to become the only
child to provide grandchildren for J.D. and Anna. Gertrude attended private school in
South Bend and later Mrs. Davis’s Finishing School at Briarcliff Manor at Briarcliff-on-
the-Hudson, New York. She was considered pretty, was popular in her social set, and