The Nevitt Family of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, has been engaged in business in northern Wisconsin for four generations. Insurance, real estate, and lumbering have been the concerns since the 1860s of Charles R. Nevitt, his son Charles, his grandson George P., and his great-grandson Charles. They have been involved with the Nevitt Insurance Agency, the Paine Lumber Company, the Butte Des Morts Land Company, and the Bayou Shooting Club.
CHARLES R. NEVITT, born in New York state in 1825, came to Oshkosh in 1853 and opened a newspaper and job printing office, after having been an apprentice and printer in his native state. In 1860, in partnership with three others, he began publishing the Oshkosh Weekly Northwestern. He sold the business in 1864 and entered the Union army as a captain of Wisconsin volunteers. Returning to Oshkosh after the Civil War, Nevitt established a real estate, insurance, and loan business in 1866. The Nevitt agency soon concentrated almost exclusively on insurance as a general agency. In 1871 Nevitt took on a partner and the name of the agency was changed from C. R. Nevitt to Nevitt and Read. This was the first of many partnerships and name changes involving the Nevitt insurance business. In 1897 Charles Nevitt, the founder's son, became a partner; later that year John West joined the partnership and the firm's name was changed to West and Nevitt. West occupied the principal role in the company, the elder Nevitt being over 72 years old and the younger involved in other business activities.
Charles R. Nevitt was also involved with his community; he held office for two terms as a justice of the peace and was a member of fraternal organizations. With his first wife, Elizabeth B. Gardner, he was the father of four sons and one daughter, Robert, Charles, William, John, and Elizabeth (Mrs. George D. Steel). He married Athlinda Fullmer in 1883, several years after the death of his first wife. Charles R. Nevitt died in Oshkosh in 1907.
The second CHARLES NEVITT was born in 1855. He worked as a young man in his father's printing and insurance businesses and read law in an attorney's office. He became a member of the bar in 1881, an Oshkosh justice of the peace the same year, and opened his own law office in 1884. Soon to be numbered among his clients was the Paine Lumber Company. He married Georgiana Paine, the daughter of the president of that firm in 1889. In 1893 he became treasurer of the Paine Lumber Company and remained in that role until his death in 1945. Nevitt was also an officer of the Paine Banking Company and, with his father and later with his son George P. and others, a partner in the Nevitt insurance agency. His role in the insurance business was largely as an inactive partner; John West, and later his wife Myrtle B. West, ran the company, with a variety of different partners, from 1897 until 1934. Charles Nevitt's role in the partnership, however, had its impact; much (if not all) of the insurance on Paine Lumber Company property was written by the Nevitt agency. By 1950 thirty percent of Nevitt's fire insurance and ten percent of its casualty insurance business came from the Paine Lumber Company and the Paine Art Center and Arboretum, Inc.
Charles Nevitt was also a founder and director of the Butte Des Morts Land Company and the Bayou Shooting Club. Butte Des Morts was organized as a shooting club in 1894. Its members purchased marshland in an area northwest of Oshkosh, bounded by the Fox and Wolf rivers and Big Butte Des Morts Lake. Incorporated in 1903 with fourteen stockholders, the company began to rent land to hunters and trappers. The following year a larger membership organization, the Bayou Shooting Club, was formed. The shooting club rented hunting rights from the land company, until it ceased operation about 1930, after which the land company continued to grant muskrat trapping rights and to rent portions of the land to private clubs and individuals for hunting. By 1940 many of the original stockholders had died or retired and more and more shares were held by disinterested heirs and estates. Charles Nevitt, by then the largest single shareholder, resigned from the board of directors and transferred his shares to his son, George P. Nevitt. Charles Nevitt died in 1945, at the age of 90.
GEORGE P. NEVITT, the only son of Charles Nevitt and Georgiana Paine Nevitt, was born in 1894. After completing his education at the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale University in 1918 with a degree in electrical engineering, he went to work as an industrial engineer for the Paine Lumber Company. He left Paine in 1934 to buy out Mrs. West and become an active partner in the Nevitt insurance agency. He remained in that role until his son Charles took over the business in 1960. The youngest Charles had been associated with the company since the death of his grandfather and namesake in 1945.
George P. Nevitt apparently returned to the Paine Lumber Company; by 1953, he was its president, according to Vernon W. Roelofs' 100 Years: Paine Lumber Co., Ltd. (Oshkosh, 1953). Both Charles Nevitt and George P. Nevitt, son and grandson of Charles R. Nevitt, held important offices in this lumbering and manufacturing firm. The Paine Lumber Company, founded in 1855, became one of the country's largest door and sash manufacturers. Its success was the result of some important innovations. First, as timber lands accessible to water transportation neared depletion, Paine bought cheaper but less accessible land in Wisconsin and Michigan and persuaded railroads to build lines into these new timber lands. The company also developed flat cars that made shipping timber by rail practical. Second, Paine pioneered the use of hardwoods in door production, using the previously undesirable birch timber stands in Northern Wisconsin. And third, Paine survived the Depression years by shifting from the manufacture of solid to hollow core doors, conserving raw material, but using more labor, which was cheap at the time.
George P. Nevitt replaced his father as a director of the Butte Des Morts Land Company in 1940 and immediately became president, a position he filled until 1958 when the company was dissolved.
