Book details the history of Dover Tank and Plate
Tom Adamich
It isn’t often a successful company remains in the hands of the founding family for a century or more. A new privately published book by local author Tom Adamich details the history of one such business, Dover Tank and Plate.
Meant to be distributed to employees at a celebratory gathering for the 100th anniversary year, the idea for “Dover Tank and Plate Company 100th Anniversary: A Positive Reflection and Forecast” originated about a year ago.
“I was familiar with the history of the company because I went to church with the (Lawless) family,” Adamich said. “I wasn’t sure of where the company was in terms of the time line since the beginning, but I learned that they were coming up on their 100-year anniversary this year. We were talking a bit after mass one day, Tim Lawless and I, and he talked about how they’d like to have a history of Dover Tank and Plate to mark this anniversary.”
The book is set for limited publication by Bloom’s Printing of Dennison later this summer.
Adamich, a Tuscarawas County native, also is the author of a book covering the history of the Greening Nursery company of Monroe, Michigan and “Clearwater’s Harbor Oaks,” about post-WWI growth in the Florida community.
“There’s a lot to the story of Dover Tank and Plate,” Adamich said, “especially in the way the company has always been an active participant in the community. You learn about the people who founded the company, of course, but then there’s so much about how they’ve always interacted with the community at large but also their professional community — the people they employ and work with and do business with.”
The company still plays an important role in the local community, producing steel for projects including a work of sculpture by artist Alice Aycock in Nashville, Tennessee. “They absolutely make a difference in our community and the economy of the area,” Adamich said. “They’re sort of a last vestige of family-owned manufacturing in the area.”
Dover Tank and Plate had origins in another state, Adamich said.
“The key to understanding this company and its beginnings really takes you back to Sharpsville, Pennsylvania, where the family owned a business there making steel tanks as storage for the burgeoning oil business. Oil became a big business segment from around the 1880s through the 1920s. The Acme Boiler Works in Dover was running into trouble, so the founders bought that facility and that’s how the company really began,” Adamich said.
Dover Tank and Plate was founded in 1922 by Bernard F. Lawless and his father, Neal.
Adamich had access to the company’s internal materials, archives and records in creating the history of the company.
Adamich, with a lifelong career in libraries, printers and publishers, finds his greatest enjoyment in writing history. “I don’t know that students get a really good foundation in history now,” he said in speaking of the many changes in historical research over the past 50 years or so. “It’s important to know where you’ve been and how you got here.”
He spoke of the changes he has observed in both his historical research and the world at large since he began working as a writer and researcher.
“You look at our area in about 1970 or so and compare it to now — there are a lot of questions that arise. I’m not sure that businesses are as involved in the lives of their employees or in the community they serve as they once were. Dover Tank and Plate is an example of a company that still has that kind of devotion,” Adamich said.
He described the opportunity to write his latest work about Dover Tank and Plate as an honor and privilege. He now lives in New Philadelphia.