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Floyd County, Iowa | I worked at White/Oliver when I got out of high school there in Charles City. The picture of the plant is taken looking east. The large building complex in the foreground (west) housed administration and machining. The large building complex at the top right (south east) was the "assembly building" or "factory building" and also house machining operations at the western end, as well as the personnel office. The assembly line started toward the western end, and ran east, about in the center line of the complex. In that complex, the taller section at the upper right (southeast) corner housed the "4-150" assembly line. All of the 4 wheel drive Whites came out of that.
The building complex with the white looking roofs at the upper left (northeast) was the foundry. There were multiple iron furnaces there, 3 of which were called the "Herman", "Jolts", and "Squeezers". I don't know if those are the proper names, but that's what everyone called them. I also don't know if one was used for certain castings vs the others. I was mostly in the assembly building with full assembly classification and material handling classification.
Of course, there were many other operations and sub-operations that were done in those building complexes, like paint, heat treat, receiving/shipping, tool and die, industrial equip assembly, and probably a hundred I can't remember.
My Mom worked in Administration/shipping, Dad held several foundry classes including iron pouring, and full assembly class, and had 30 years there. When the 4-150 building was finished, Dad went there and finished his "career" assembling the 4wd tractors.
One of my aunts was in Personnel, an uncle was a foreman in machining, an uncle was in Maintenance and Repair, and another uncle was in the foundry.
Pretty much everyone that lived in Charles City had a family member that worked there or whose job was tied to the tractor plant or Salsbury Labs. The town, with a population of only about 10,000 had 5 public elementary schools, the public junior high school and the public high school, as well as a k thru 12 Catholic school. There were multiple small neighborhood grocery stores scattered through town, so most could take a short walk to a grocery store from home.
Charles City is a totally different scenario now, barely a shadow of what it was.
Sorry about rambling on, just a lot of memories of the place and town. | |
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Charles City Tractor Factory History
