Around the time that we moved from Westbank the museum moved from its long time location in a little building west of the Westbank townsite into this much more spacious location. Housing a plethora of antiquities and memorabilia, this is a really good museum for a relatively small community. Possibly I shouldn't say that, as the West Kelowna area comprises a large, semi rural area of about 40,000 residents.
In the museum are many artefacts portraying day to day life as it would have been in the days of the area's settlers in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Further displays indicate advancements in technology through the years which made life a little easier as time marched inexorably on.
Outside the museum building are a few pieces of machinery and an old truck, the make of which I used to know. Much of the machinery I remember from the old location has not yet found a perch, though this old plough has. It's a two bottom sulky style plough, a huge improvement in comfort and productivity over the walk-behind ploughs which preceded it. After about giving up on finding a maker's name, I spied the word "
OLIVER" embossed on an iron fitting, telling us that it was made by the Oliver Farm Equipment Company. This likely began life as a horse drawn plough, later being converted to be tractor drawn.
More correctly, it was likely a product of the
Oliver Chilled Plow Works, the predecessor to the The Oliver Corporation. The name,
Oliver Chilled Plow Works was adopted in 1901. In 1929, the merger of four companies, Hart-Parr Tractor Works, Nichols & Shepard Company, Oliver Chilled Plow Works and American Seeding Company produced the
Oliver Farm Equipment Company, which it remained for many years, being rebranded
The Oliver Corporation in 1944. Eventually bought by the White Motor Company, the last Oliver tractor rolled off the assembly line in 1976 and the company was sold off in bits by White Motor Company. All that remains of the Oliver companies are memories.
The Oliver Corporation
In June 1857, James Oliver received his first patent, Number 76,939 It covered the essential features of the chilled iron plow and in February of the following year, he was granted another patent that covered the unique chilling process, which Mr. Oliver had developed. By 1868 the small Oliver factory was incorporated and renamed as the South Bend Iron Works.
The South Bend Iron Works built a new foundry, warehouse, machine shop, and a wood shop. The factory, in addition to making plows, kept busy by making castings for Singer Sewing Machine Company, casting wagon skeins for Studebaker, and making numerous other castings on order. Oliver continued making wagon skeins for Studebaker until 1874, by which time the volume of plow orders had grown so much that Oliver then devoted full time to making the Oliver Chilled Plow.
In 1870 the Oliver trademark was adopted and would, from then on, appear on every Oliver Chilled Plow produced. The South Bend Register commented in 1871 that Oliver “…[if he keeps on improving his plow] it will soon have no rivals in the country. The popularity of the Oliver Chilled Plow is almost unprecedented in the history of plows.”3 In 1871 the factory sold 1,500 plows, three years later the company made and sold 17,000 plows and had outgrown their factory.
In 1901 the South Bend Iron Works was incorporated and the name was changed to the Oliver Chilled Plow Works with all 5,000 company shares held by members of the Oliver family.9 By 1905, James Oliver had been in the plow business for 50 years. This was also the most productive and successful year for the Oliver Chilled Plow Works.
The following year, at the age of 83, James was granted the last of his 45 patents. He had been successful in making the plow a useful and strong farming instrument. In a U.S. Senate report to Congress it was stated that if, for a single year, all the farmers in the United States would use the Oliver Chilled Plow instead of regular steel or iron plows, the savings in labor would have totaled the sum of $45,000,000 (and this was the early 1900s)! In 1910 it required 135 man-hours to produce 100 bushels of corn. Through the innovations of James Oliver, that amount of time had decreased to 23 man-hours by 1960.
From the South Bend History Museum