Oliver Farm Equipment Company

The Oliver Farm Equipment Company was an American farm equipment manufacturer from the 20th century. It was formed as a result of a 1929 merger of four companies: the American Seeding Machine Company of Richmond, Indiana; Oliver Chilled Plow Works of South Bend, Indiana; Hart-Parr Tractor Company of Charles City, Iowa; and Nichols and Shepard Company of Battle Creek, Michigan

On November 1, 1960, the White Motor Corporation of Cleveland, Ohio purchased the Oliver Farm Equipment Company.

Four companies joined forces on April 1, 1929. The Oliver Chilled Plow Company dated from 1855. Hart-Parr Tractor Company began operations in 1897, and the American Seeding Machine Company, dated back to 1848. Nichols and Shepard Company, likewise began operations in 1848.

By 1929, each of these companies had essentially outgrown its usefulness to the industry. For most of them, the market had some time earlier reached a saturation point. In some instances, their machines were badly dated and rapidly approaching obsolescence. For each of these companies to have attempted further activity on solo basis would almost have certainly been disastrous. By uniting their various and somewhat diverse product lines into a single company, Oliver Farm Equipment instantly became a virtual full-line manufacturer.

The American Seeding Machine Company was organized in 1903 from the a merger of seven different manufacturers of grain drills, corn planters and other "seeding machines." The leading corporate component among the seven merged companies was the Superior Drill Company of Springfield, Ohio. Accordingly, the American Seeding Machine Company established its corporate headquarters at Springfield in the facilities formerly operated by the Superior Drill Company. Other companies which formed the 1903 merger include P. P. Mast and Company (est. 1856), Hoosier Drill Company (est. 1857), the Empire Drill Company, and Bickford & Huffman. The Superior Drill Company name lived on for many years following the merger that created Oliver, in the "Oliver Superior" line of seeding drills and related equipment.

The business called the Oliver Chilled Plow Works was established by James Oliver in 1853. James Oliver first settled in Mishawaka, Indiana in 1836 where he worked in a local foundry business. Later he bought into an already existing small foundry in South Bend, Indiana. Plows with cast iron bottoms and moldboards had been successfully used by farmers and planters in the eastern states of the United States since the time of Thomas Jefferson. However, in the sticky soils of North Dakota and various other portions of the Midwest, the cast iron plows would not "scour"; that is, the sticky soil would cling to the plow, disrupting the flow of soil over the plow's surface, making plowing impossible. Thus, when settlement of North America moved over the Allegheny Mountains into the Midwest, there was a real need for a new plow that would scour in the soils of the Midwest. To allow a cast iron bottom to scour in sticky soil, various methods of heat treating for creating a hardened surface on the metal plow bottom had been attempted. All of these processes failed because the hard surface created was very thin and would soon wear through to the soft iron under the heat-treated surface. James Oliver developed his sand casting process to include rapid chilling of the molten iron near the outside surface of the casting, which resulted in a bottom that had a thick hardened surface with far greater wearability than competing plow bottoms.

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