He’s seldom mentioned today, but Charlie Nash was one of the pioneers of the U.S. auto industry and helped to found two great carmakers.

Many industrialists of his time liked to embellish their biographies in this regard, but the life of Charles W. Nash was a genuine rags-to-riches story. Born on a farm in rural Cortland, llinois in 1864, he became an orphan at the age of six when his parents split up and abandoned him. A court bound the boy over as an indentured servant to a Michigan farmer until he was 21, but he ran away at 12 and learned to become a carpenter. He eventually made his way to Flint, Michigan, where in 1890 William C. Durant of the Flint Road Cart Company, later to become the Durant-Dort Carriage Company, hired him as an upholsterer. Within six months Durant promoted Nash to factory superintendent.

Impressed by Nash’s natural talent for manufacturing and management, in 1910 Durant placed Nash in charge of production at Buick, the star company in Durant’s  growing General Motors combine, and at Buick Nash was soon given the title of vice president. Durant became overextended and when he was forced out of the company in late 1912, the bankers appointed Nash to replace him as president of General Motors.

In his new post Nash cut away the deadwood created by Durant’s endless acquisitions and transformed GM into a highly profitable company. But when Durant wrestled back control of GM in 1916 and offered Nash a $1 million salary to stay on and run the company, Nash said no, thanks to Durant’s impulsive management style and walked away.

After an attempt to purchase Packard was rebuffed, in 1916 Nash and his financial backers acquired the Thomas B. Jeffery Company of Kenosha, Wisconsin, renaming it Nash Motors a year later. The new Nash car was an immediate success, and Alfred P. Sloan, his old friend at GM, reported a tidy profit on his Nash shares. For a time Nash was the USA’s fourth largest automaker behind GM, Ford, and Chrysler, offering well-appointed, upmarket cars in the Buick price range.

In 1937 Nash retired from his company, hand-picking his replacement, George W Mason of the appliance maker Kelvinator, and engineered a merger between the two companies that produced the Nash-Kelvinator Corporation. The former orphan and indentured farmhand then retired to Beverly Hills, California where, as one of the city’s wealthiest residents, he passed away on June 6, 1948 at the age of 84.