The Studebaker National Museum
Near South Bend, Indiana
The Studebaker National Museum occupies a building in downtown South Bend that it shares with the city's main history museum. When it opened in its current form in November of two thousand five, the collection it displayed had been growing for decades, assembled from what the company left behind when it closed in nineteen sixty-three.
The collection holds more than seventy vehicles arranged chronologically across three floors. On the main level: wagons from the eighteen hundreds and cars from the early automobile era, including a nineteen oh two Studebaker electric, one of the first the company ever built. Upstairs: the postwar models, the Champions and Commanders and the late experimental designs, including a concept car from the early nineteen sixties called the Sceptre that never went into production but shows what the engineers were still dreaming about as the company was quietly failing.
In the lower level, military vehicles. Studebaker made trucks for the United States Army during World War Two in such quantities that the vehicles became a significant presence in the Allied supply chain. Some of those trucks are here.
The collection also includes carriages used by American presidents, among them one belonging to Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln's carriages were built by Studebaker when the company was still in the horse-drawn era. The president who issued the Emancipation Proclamation was driven in a vehicle made in South Bend.
One more item of note: a Studebaker sedan that appeared in The Muppet Movie. The Muppets drove a Studebaker. That is not a metaphor for anything. It is just a fact, and it is here.
