Studebaker: Wagons to the World
Near South Bend, Indiana
In February of eighteen fifty-two, two brothers named Clement and Henry Studebaker opened a blacksmith and wagon shop in South Bend with a combined capital of sixty-eight dollars and some tools. They made metal parts for wagons. It was modest work in a modest city.
Six years later, their younger brother John Mohler Studebaker returned from California with eight thousand dollars he had earned building wheelbarrows for gold rush miners. Forty-niners had called him Wheelbarrow Johnny. The money he brought back transformed the shop.
The Studebaker Brothers Manufacturing Company incorporated in eighteen sixty-eight. During the Civil War, the company had fulfilled large contracts supplying wagons to the Union Army, and the business never stopped growing after that. By the turn of the twentieth century, Studebaker was producing over one hundred thousand horse-drawn vehicles per year. Contemporaries called it the largest wagon and buggy manufacturer in the world. That distinction was accurate.
What happened next was almost without parallel in American industry. When the automobile appeared, most wagon makers failed to adapt and went out of business. Studebaker adapted. The company began making electric vehicles in nineteen oh two and gasoline cars in nineteen oh four. It was the only major horse-drawn vehicle manufacturer to successfully become an automobile company.
By the nineteen twenties, the South Bend facilities sprawled across two hundred twenty-five acres. The company employed roughly twenty-three thousand workers at its peak. The Champion model, introduced in nineteen thirty-nine, outsold every car in America in its price class. Studebaker's engineers kept innovating: the company opened what it called the first controlled automotive testing grounds in America, an eight hundred forty-acre facility south of New Carlisle, in nineteen twenty-six. It planted five thousand pine trees there in nineteen thirty-seven spelling the word Studebaker, visible from the air.
Then came the Depression, receivership in nineteen thirty-three, recovery, World War Two production, and the long competitive pressure of Ford and General Motors in the postwar years. The end came faster than most saw coming.
