The night 3,000 were invited to the Oliver Hotel

South Bend, Ind. On the evening of 20 December 1899 the new Oliver Hotel held its first reception. About three thousand invitations had gone out, to South Bend, Chicago and other cities. Palms and cut flowers filled the rooms, a buffet supper was served all evening, and every part of the house was open for guests to look over. The next day it opened to the public.

The host was James Oliver, the South Bend plow maker. With him stood his wife, his son Joseph D. Oliver and his wife, and his only daughter and her husband, George Ford. The Indianapolis Journal’s man in South Bend called it “probably the largest” reception ever given in the city.

It was a big night for a factory town, and it was meant to be. For sixty-seven years the six-story hotel at the northwest corner of Main and Washington Streets was where South Bend put its best foot forward: where plow buyers from overseas slept, where the town held its banquets, and where, one spring in the early 1900s, a hotel clerk turned away a young Black ballplayer and set a chain of events in motion that ran all the way to Jackie Robinson. This is the story of the Oliver, from the first stone to the wrecking ball.

The plow maker and his town

DocumentedJames Oliver was born on 28 August 1823 in Liddesdale, in the Scottish Borders, and came to America with his family as a boy. In South Bend he became a foundryman, and his fortune rested on one idea: a plow made of chilled iron, hard enough on its face to scour clean in sticky prairie soil. He began selling plows in 1857, received a patent in 1868 for a large plow drawn by a team, and over his lifetime registered forty-five patents on improved plow designs. His firm began as the South Bend Iron Works.

DocumentedThe family did not forget where it came from. When Joseph D. Oliver, called J.D., and his wife Anna Gertrude finished their great house at 808 West Washington Street, they named it Copshaholm, after the place in Scotland where James Oliver was born. They moved in on 1 January 1897. The house had 38 rooms, 14 fireplaces, a ballroom and an elevator, and it still stands as part of The History Museum in South Bend.

DocumentedThe Olivers had built for the town before. In 1885 James and J.D., both lovers of the stage, opened the Oliver Opera House on Main Street at a cost of $200,000, so that South Bend could see first-class theatre without a trip to Chicago. Its vestibule was marble and mahogany, and its scenery was painted by the Chicago scenic artists who had worked on the Chicago Opera House. James Oliver also agreed in 1887 to pay one-third of the cost of a new Presbyterian church, and in 1900 offered to build a city hall and lease it to the city.

Built for the plow trade

DocumentedCustomers of the plow works came to South Bend from overseas, and until then, the History Museum says, there was nowhere fit to put them up. So the Olivers built a hotel themselves. The first stone of the foundation was laid in July 1898 at the northwest corner of Main and Washington Streets, and James Oliver, then in his seventies, watched over most of the work.

DocumentedThe museum adds two details that explain why the old man was on the job. Trouble getting a site had held the project up for some time. And J.D., who ran the business day to day, had been ordered to take an ocean voyage to recover from overwork, so his father took charge of the building himself. The Oliver family history also says the plan had once aimed at an opening for Thanksgiving 1898, more than a year before the doors actually opened.

DocumentedThe designers were not local men. Notre Dame’s Building South Bend project names the architects as the Boston firm of Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge, the successors of the great H. H. Richardson. The same firm had designed the Stanford University campus in California and the Art Institute of Chicago of 1893, and in 1897 had finished the building in Chicago now known as the Chicago Cultural Center. For South Bend they drew a six-story hotel with a steel skeleton, hollow-tile arches and tile partitions, which made it fireproof. It cost $600,000.

ReadingA hotel at that price, by a Boston firm of that standing, tells us what the Olivers wanted the building to say. A buyer from overseas, stepping off the train, was to find a house as good as the ones he had left behind in Chicago or New York, and he was to know who had paid for it.

A house that made its own light

DocumentedThe hotel had 250 guest rooms, and its first manager was Charles Baur, who had come from Terre Haute. It made its own electricity, with three dynamos to light 1,700 lamps. The lobby and rotunda were done in the Italian Renaissance style and trimmed with gold, and sixteen painted women at the top of the rotunda stood for the seasons, the arts and the four elements. The South Bend Tribune called it “the most magnificent hotel in Indiana.”

DocumentedThe Tribune did not stop there. As the History Museum quotes it, the paper went on to call the Oliver “one of the finest in the United States.” Notre Dame’s historians record that the hotel was known as the “most beautifully decorated building west of New York.” The first two floors were public rooms. The painted figures in the rotunda, by the museum’s count, stood for the four seasons, the arts, and earth, water, fire and air.

DocumentedThe three dynamos in the basement were driven by three engines of the hotel’s own. Later the Olivers built a hydroelectric plant on the West Race of the St. Joseph River, and on 6 June 1905 it began furnishing electricity to the plow works; the hotel too came to draw its power from it. Parts of that plant’s foundations and control gates were later worked into the Century Center complex beside the river.

DocumentedThe Clio entry on the hotel lists the comforts a guest could count on: butlers, a bakery, Western Union messengers, a drugstore with a soda counter, and a barbershop in the house. A history of the hotel published by the postcard site Cardboard America adds that the Oliver was built without a bar or cocktail lounge, in deference to the temperance movement of the day.

DocumentedThe dining rooms ate off their own china. A celery dish dated 1925, in the Syracuse China pattern called Isis, carries the hotel’s mark in blue and tan. The same pattern was also made by the Maddock Pottery Company on a body supplied by Albert Pick and Company, the Chicago hotel-supply house whose name would later go on the hotel itself.

“the most magnificent hotel in Indiana, one of the finest in the United States.”

Opening night

DocumentedThe opening reception of 20 December was the climax of a long build. The Indianapolis Journal of the next morning gave the invitations at about three thousand; the Cardboard America history, drawing on the Tribune, puts the figure at more than four thousand. Either way, the guest list ran far past the city limits, to Chicago and other cities. The History Museum gives the opening date as 21 December, which matches the Journal: the invited reception came first, and the doors opened to the public the next day.

ReadingLook at who stood in the receiving line. James Oliver and his wife Susan; J.D. and Anna Gertrude; and Josephine Oliver with her husband George Ford. Ford was a Democrat who had been elected to Congress from South Bend in 1884, in a Republican family, and had married Josephine on 25 November 1885. The line was the family firm in miniature, and the evening was as much a statement about the Olivers as about the building.

DocumentedSouth Bend thanked the family in its own way. On 30 May 1900 a gathering of citizens presented them with an eighteen-carat gold loving cup made by Tiffany and Company. The History Museum’s timeline ties the gift to the building of the hotel; its family history describes it as thanks for the Olivers’ public gifts to the city as a whole.

DocumentedSusan Oliver did not enjoy the new hotel for long. She died on 13 September 1902, after a long illness, having been married to James for more than fifty-eight years. James Oliver died on 2 March 1908, at the age of eighty-four, in his South Bend home.

The catcher and the clerk

DocumentedThe best-known story told about the Oliver is not about luxury at all. Ohio Wesleyan University’s baseball team came to South Bend to play Notre Dame, and with it came its coach, a young man named Branch Rickey, and its catcher, Charles Thomas, the only Black player on the team. The hotel clerk would not give Thomas a room. Rickey talked the management into letting Thomas stay on a cot in Rickey’s own room.

DocumentedWhat happened next Rickey told many times after he signed Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers. As the Associated Press reported his account, he found Thomas that evening sobbing and rubbing his hands, saying, “Black skin. Black skin. If only I could make them white.” Rickey said he vowed then to do whatever he could so that other Americans would not have to face “the bitter humiliation that was heaped upon Charles Thomas.” Robinson took the field for Brooklyn on 15 April 1947.

DocumentedThomas himself, interviewed in 1958, remembered Rickey’s kindness: “During the three years that I was at OW, no man could have treated me better.” He went on to earn a dentistry degree at Ohio State in 1908, practiced in St. Louis and then for about forty years in Albuquerque, and died in 1971.

ReadingWas it the Oliver? Rickey’s account, as the papers carried it, names South Bend but not the hotel, and Ohio Wesleyan’s own history places the trip in 1903 without naming the house. South Bend writers and the Clio entry place it at the Oliver, which in those years was the obvious choice for a visiting team. The identification is likely, but it rests on local tradition rather than on Rickey’s own words, and the year is given variously as 1903 and 1904.

ReadingA hotel register or a South Bend newspaper report of the Ohio Wesleyan–Notre Dame game would settle the hotel and the date. We have not yet found either.

The Oliver grows up

DocumentedThe hotel did well enough to grow. In 1909, as J.D. Oliver doubled the footprint of the plow works and remodeled the Oliver Opera House block, an annex to the hotel was opened, and the History Museum describes it as seven stories tall. In 1901 the South Bend Iron Works had taken the name Oliver Chilled Plow Works, and on 30 March 1929 that company too passed into history, folded into the new Oliver Farm Equipment Company. J.D. Oliver died at Copshaholm on 6 August 1933, at eighty-three.

DocumentedThe family’s hold on the hotel loosened before the plow company’s did. According to the Cardboard America history, which draws on the South Bend Tribune’s files, the Oliver company ran the hotel until money troubles in the 1920s and sold it about 1927 to Andrew C. Weisburg. Its proprietor in the 1930s, Arka Shanks, died in his apartment in the hotel on 13 January 1936. Management passed to the Pick Hotels corporation in 1938, and Pick bought the building outright on 20 October 1942.

DocumentedPostcards kept the Oliver in front of travelers throughout these years. A card of the hotel used as a cover in the St. Joseph County Public Library’s collection carries a postmark of 1922, and the History Museum holds a photograph of about 1908 that looks northwest across the corner while an electric streetcar runs east on Washington Street toward Main.

The Pick-Oliver and the wrecking ball

DocumentedIn later years it was the Pick-Oliver. Its big sign was taken down in November 1957, and in the late summer of 1967 the wrecking ball brought the building down while people on the sidewalk watched. A bank tower went up on the corner, and it was long known as the Chase Tower.

DocumentedThe library’s photographs tell the end in three frames. On 18 November 1957 workmen dismantled the sign on the Pick-Oliver. In 1967 a photographer recorded the murals along the inside walls, one last time. On 25 August 1967 a lone spectator stood watching the ball take the building down, and on 15 September people on the sidewalk watched “the final wall of the Pick Oliver hotel” crumble.

DocumentedThe Cardboard America history gives the business side. When Studebaker closed its South Bend plant on 9 December 1963, the hotel lost trade. By 1965 Pick wanted to sell, and the land went to developers from Tulsa, Oklahoma. The old hotel, then about sixty-seven years old, had no parking of its own.

DocumentedConstruction of the tower began in 1968. It opened in 1970 as the American National Bank Building, twenty-five floors and about 332 feet to the roof, the tallest building in South Bend; later it carried the names of Valley American Bank and Chase. After New York’s Washington Square Realty took it over in 2014, the building was rebuilt inside, an Aloft hotel opened in it in 2017, and by September 2018 a new sign on top announced its new name: the Liberty Tower. So the corner the Olivers chose in 1898 once again has hotel guests sleeping on it.

ReadingThe Oliver came down for the reasons that took down many grand railroad-era hotels in the 1960s: a factory town losing its biggest employer, travelers arriving by car and wanting a place to park it, and a building whose plaster rotunda was worth less than the land under it. What survived was the reputation, carried on postcards and in the memory of anyone who ate under those sixteen painted women.

A timeline

• 1823 James Oliver born, 28 August, in Liddesdale, Scotland
• 62 years later
• 1885 The Oliver Opera House opens on Main Street
• 1897 J.D. and Anna Gertrude Oliver move into Copshaholm, 1 January
• 1898 First foundation stone laid at Main and Washington, July
• 1899 Opening reception, 20 December; public opening, 21 December
• 1900 Citizens give James and Susan Oliver a Tiffany gold loving cup, 30 May
• 1903–04 Ohio Wesleyan catcher Charles Thomas refused a room in South Bend
• 1905 The Oliver hydroelectric plant on the West Race begins supplying power, 6 June
• 1908 James Oliver dies, 2 March
• 1909 Seven-story annex opens
• 18 years later
• c. 1927 Hotel sold out of the Oliver company
• 15 years later
• 1942 Pick Hotels buys the hotel, 20 October
• 15 years later
• 1957 Sign dismantled, 18 November
• 1967 Demolished, August–September
• 1970 American National Bank Building opens on the site
• 48 years later
• 2018 The tower renamed the Liberty Tower

If you go

DocumentedThe corner of Main and Washington is public ground in the heart of downtown South Bend, and the Liberty Tower stands where the Oliver did. A few blocks west, at 808 West Washington Street, Copshaholm, the Oliver family’s house, is open as part of The History Museum, which also holds photographs and papers of the family and its businesses.