The Family Business

On the twenty-eighth of November, 1637, the town of Dedham voted Edward Colver, wheelwright, two acres “for imploym’t in his trade” and free liberty of taking timber — the earliest dated record of the immigrant ancestor, and nearly every word of it about his usefulness. Run a finger down the family’s records asking not what they believed but what they did for a living, and a quieter story assembles itself: bread, beer, beds, wheels, shoes, land, flour, cheese, shirts, a dredging machine, and the telephone.

The shape repeats for three hundred and ninety years: the licensed, necessary trade — the shop a settlement needs next. Edward brewed “for the publicke good” at New London; a Culver kept the only house between Riverhead and Southampton; Jabez, the family’s quiet speculator, assembled and liquidated seven hundred acres on the Chemung; Aaron’s mill fed the Long Point settlement until an American raid burned it; a cousin made cheese in Townsend, another made shirts in Lansing, and the Collvers of Bay County ran the telephone exchanges at Munger, East Tawas, and Climax — with Mary Rebecca Collver keeping the books.

And the oldest line of business never closed: three and a half centuries after the town chose its brewer, a tenth-great-grandson of that brewer keeps a brewery and taproom in a Michigan town. Some businesses are family businesses by teaching; this one, like the doves on the name, seems to be one by homing.

Text, sources, and notes at history.collver.biz.