Tuesday, November 19, 2019

History & Studebaker Museums

Saturday, September 14, 2019 - Grovertown, IN

Today we decided it was a good day to finally go to the Studebaker Museum.  This museum is in the same building as the South Bend History Museum, so we were able to tour both of them. 

As soon as we arrived and paid our admission fee they let us know a tour of the Oliver mansion was getting ready to start.  We didn't even know they had tours of the Oliver mansion, so we decided to go on it.  The Oliver family gained their wealth from the invention of the Oliver Chilled Plow and The Oliver Farm Equipment Corporation.

The outside of the mansion is beautiful!
 

And this is the carriage house.
The inside of the house is amazing!





All of the furnishing you see are the actually furnishings used by the family.  When the last children of J.D. and Anna Oliver passed away, the grandchildren gave the history museum the house along with all of the contents!  Their youngest son and daughter ended up living their last several years in the mansion.  The son lived on the third floor and the daughter lived on the second floor.

They even moved the butler's house to the museum property, but you can only tour the first floor of this structure.  After the butler's wife passed away and he was getting up in years they asked him to move into the house with them  When he passed away, he was the first and only non-Oliver family person whose body was allowed to lie in state in the Mourning Room.  I did not take any pictures of his house, but it was just a modest house.

Our guide did a wonderful job!

After the tour we went through the History museum.  It was a very good museum.

Soon we made it over to the Studebaker Museum.  :)





It was a great museum.  All in all we learned a lot about the Oliver and Studebaker families.  They were both in South Bend in the same era.

We met Tony and Miranda for dinner and on our way home I took a couple of pictures of the full moon. 

It was another wonderful day!

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