Charles Williams Nash

He is a Kenosha industrialist by adult life, not by birth.

He was born in Cortland, Illinois, on January 28, 1864. Indentured to a Michigan farmer after his parents split, he ran away at twelve, learned carpentry, and later stuffed cushions for a dollar a day at Billy Durant’s carriage works in Flint. He rose to the GM presidency, then quit when Durant recaptured the company, saying a million dollars a year was “more than a man’s worth.” In August 1916 he put five hundred thousand dollars down for the Thomas B. Jeffery Company of Kenosha—Ramblers, a lakefront plant, and a house at 6221 Third Avenue thrown in with the deal—and in 1917 the first Nash rolled out of the old Rambler works.

He kept the books tight and the slogan simpler: “Give the customer more than he has paid for.” World War I briefly made him the world’s largest truck builder, with 11,490 four-wheel-drive Quads for the Army in 1918. By the late 1920s Nash was a top-selling independent employing thousands in a city that would remain an AMC town long after he was gone. He lived on Third Avenue until about 1935, merged with Kelvinator in 1937, handed the wheel to George Mason, deeded the house toward Kemper Hall in 1938, and died in Beverly Hills on June 6, 1948. The jobs stayed until Chrysler wound the Kenosha plant down decades later.