The biggest wagon works in the world

South Bend, Ind. Shortly before six o’clock on the evening of Monday, 17 June 1872, the fire bell rang in South Bend. The great wooden wagon factory of the Studebaker brothers was burning, and workmen on the upper floors had to jump from the windows to save their lives.

Two years later it happened again, worse. After the second fire, cities from Chicago to Cincinnati bid for the firm, and the brothers stayed and built bigger. By 1907 the works in South Bend covered more than a hundred acres and turned out more than a hundred thousand vehicles a year. This second part of our series is the story of how a blacksmith shop became the biggest wagon works in the world, and then a car company.

The war and the wagons

DocumentedThe Civil War made the firm. Wagons and ambulances moved the Union armies, and the company’s own history of 1924 says the census of 1870 counted the Studebakers “a most important source of supply”; even so, they “were unable to satisfy fully the demands made upon them.” Carlisle wrote in 1907 that the government gave them “their first great order” in 1864. By 1867, Erskine says, the factory buildings covered four acres and employed 140 mechanics, with a payroll of more than $1,500 a week.

DocumentedWhen the brothers incorporated in March 1868, the business had net assets of about $223,000 and sales of about $350,000 a year. Chapman’s history printed the count of farm and freight wagons built each year after that. It rose from 3,955 in 1868 to 6,950 in 1872 and 20,000 in 1879, a total of 137,440 in twelve years. The workforce grew from 190 to 800.

Two fires

DocumentedNew findingThe South Bend Union described the first fire two days later. The building was a three-storey wooden L, about 200 feet along Lafayette Street and 160 feet along South Street, with machinery that could turn out “the complete wood work of twenty-five wagons per day.” The fire began, the paper said, from “friction engendered in the journals of the fans” that carried dust and shavings to the engine room. The roof of the Third Ward schoolhouse caught too. The paper put the company’s loss at $70,000. The burned building was not the whole works. The 1875 atlas says the brothers had bought it in 1867 for their wood-working machinery, and that “in 1871 they began the erection of their mammoth wagon works south of the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway”; they completed the works south of the railway in 1872–73, on the site they would keep.

DocumentedAt about a quarter to five on the morning of Monday, 24 August 1874, fire broke out again, this time in the paint rooms. The South Bend Tribune reported that the alarm bell in the cupola “could not be rung,” and that the fire was under control by half past six. By then it had destroyed “over 2,000 finished wagons stored in the basement.” The wood shops were saved.

DocumentedThe Associated Press report from South Bend that day gave the loss, item by item: $120,000 on the building, $50,000 in stock being made, $100,000 in finished wagons, $15,000 in machinery and $15,000 in iron and fixtures, for a total of $300,000, “thought to be rather under the loss.” About three hundred men were put out of work for the time being. The fire was put down to spontaneous combustion in the paint shop, though “a few aver that it was the work of an incendiary.” Thousands came to a mass meeting of sympathy.

ReadingThe figures grew in the telling, though not all at once. For 1872 the Union said $70,000, the wire report $50,000, and Goodrich and Tuttle in 1875 “nearly one hundred thousand dollars”; Carlisle in 1907 said $80,000. For 1874 the Associated Press said $300,000, which it thought “rather under the loss,” and the county atlas of 1875 already gave “about $350,000,” the figure Carlisle repeated with 2,400 wagons. Beware, too, of the “fire of 1872” in the older South Bend histories: Anderson and Howard use that heading for Mishawaka’s great fire of that September, which had nothing to do with the Studebakers. The Smithsonian Libraries’ online timeline adds a third great fire at the works in 1885; we have found no report of one in the papers of that year, and the company’s own histories name only 1872 and 1874.

DocumentedChapman tells what happened next. “Chicago, Cincinnati and many other cities made large bids to attract the firm,” but the brothers “respectfully declined all the tempting offers from abroad.” They rebuilt once more in South Bend, on the site south of the railroad.

One every nine minutes

DocumentedBy 1879 the rebuilt works were turning out vehicles at a rate that still sounds remarkable. “Last year there were 20,000 vehicles built in these works,” Chapman wrote in 1880, “thus averaging one turned out every nine minutes.” The buildings covered twenty-seven acres, ran on three miles of belting, and made seventy-five different styles of vehicle.

“Last year there were 20,000 vehicles built in these works, thus averaging one turned out every nine minutes.”

DocumentedAt the Paris Exposition of 1878 Studebaker took a silver medal. The firm had a repository in Chicago by the end of 1874, by the county atlas; by 1876 it was at 265 Wabash Avenue, in 1880 at 151 and 153 Wabash, and by 1884 at 233 State Street, its “Palace Repository”; in 1885 it opened a great showroom, the Studebaker Repository, on Michigan Avenue; in 1898 the building became the Fine Arts Building, which it still is. By 1904–07, Carlisle wrote, the South Bend works covered “more than 100 acres,” employed more than three thousand men, used more than fifty million feet of lumber a year, and made and sold “more than 100,000 vehicles … in a single year.” From 1868 to 1910 the company’s sales totaled about $119 million, and Erskine counted “over one million horse-drawn vehicles of all kinds.”

DocumentedStudebaker wagons went to war again, and far from home. In the Boer War the British commander, Lord Roberts, reported that wagons imported from the United States for trial “proved to be superior to any other make,” and named them as built by the Studebaker Brothers Manufacturing Company. The company also made harness from 1891 and set up a Studebaker Harness Company in 1906.

Carriages for presidents

DocumentedThe firm built fine carriages as well as farm wagons, and some went to the White House. The carriage of President Benjamin Harrison was, in the company’s words, “built by Studebaker and used by President Harrison for many years.” The landau President Grant used in his second term, 1873 to 1877, was built by Brewster & Co. of New York, the museum says, and was given to the company by his son, Gen. Frederick D. Grant, on 2 October 1910. The museum in South Bend also shows President McKinley’s phaeton and the barouche the Marquis de Lafayette rode in on his American tour of 1824–25.

ReadingOne famous carriage was not a Studebaker at all. The barouche in which Abraham Lincoln rode to Ford’s Theatre on 14 April 1865 was built by Wood Brothers of New York in 1864. Clem Studebaker bought it in 1889, and it is now one of the treasures of the Studebaker collection. Some accounts, including the Smithsonian Libraries’ online timeline, call it “the Studebaker carriage,” which is true of where it now lives but not of who made it.

The horseless carriage

DocumentedThe family’s next generation saw what was coming. In the spring of 1897, Erskine says, the directors’ minutes record the building of “a ‘horseless vehicle.’” The man most credited with the turn is Frederick S. Fish, a Newark lawyer who had married J. M.’s daughter Grace, joined the board in 1891, and became chairman of its executive committee when Peter died in 1897.

DocumentedStudebaker began with electric cars. The first electric runabout was sold on 12 February 1902 to F. W. Blees of Macon, Missouri, and 1,841 electrics were made through 1912. The first gasoline car, a sixteen-horsepower two-cylinder machine, was sold on 22 July 1904 to H. D. Johnson of South Bend; its chassis were made under contract by the Garford company of Elyria, Ohio.

DocumentedIn September 1908 Studebaker made an agreement to sell the cars of the Everett-Metzger-Flanders Company of Detroit, the E-M-F, and by 1910 it owned the company outright. On 14 February 1911 the Studebaker Corporation was incorporated in New Jersey, with J. M. as chairman and Fish as president. The last electric was built in 1912. In 1919 the corporation stopped making buggies, carriages and harness, and in 1920 the last farm wagons. The South Bend vehicle plants were turned over to car bodies and parts.

DocumentedJ. M., the last of the five brothers, lived to see it. He died in South Bend on 16 March 1917, aged eighty-three. Among his gifts to the city was the land for Howard Park, whose fountain was dedicated on 21 July 1906. “Fifty-six years ago,” he said that night, “I landed in South Bend as poor a boy as stands before me tonight. The only shoes I wore were those God had given me.” The fountain was taken down in the 1940s; restored, it was rededicated in Leeper Park in 2019.

“Fifty-six years ago, I landed in South Bend as poor a boy as stands before me tonight. The only shoes I wore were those God had given me.”

Erskine’s gamble

DocumentedAlbert Russel Erskine, born in Huntsville, Alabama, in 1871, joined the company as treasurer in 1911 and was its president from 1915. He moved car making to South Bend, where the six-storey Assembly Building 84, designed by Albert Kahn, went up in 1923. In 1926 the company opened a proving ground near New Carlisle, one of the first controlled testing grounds in the industry. In 1928 Erskine bought Pierce-Arrow.

DocumentedThen the Depression came. Later writers fault Erskine for paying dividends the company had not earned. On 18 March 1933 Federal Judge Thomas W. Slick placed the Studebaker Corporation in receivership at South Bend and named three receivers: Harold S. Vance and Paul G. Hoffman, both vice presidents, and A. G. Bean, president of the White Motor Company.

DocumentedNew findingOn the morning of 1 July 1933, the United Press reported from South Bend, Erskine shot himself at his home; his son found him. He was sixty-two. The contemporary report settles a date some modern accounts give as 30 June.

DocumentedNew findingVance and Hoffman brought the company back. On 28 January 1935, at Fort Wayne, Judge Slick approved its reorganization under the new section 77-B of the bankruptcy law, with $5,500,000 of new money from three New York investment houses and one in Chicago, and with Vance as chairman and Hoffman as president. The United Press called it “the first time that an automobile concern ever has survived a receivership.” Hoffman left in 1948 to run the Marshall Plan.

The arsenal years

DocumentedPassenger cars stopped in early 1942. In their place South Bend built the US6, a two-and-a-half-ton six-wheel-drive truck: 197,678 of them at South Bend from 1941 to 1945, plus more than 22,000 built under contract by REO. Most went to the Soviet Union under Lend-Lease. The company also built about 15,000 M29 Weasels, a small tracked carrier for snow and mud, and 63,789 Wright Cyclone engines for the B-17 bomber, assembled at the government plant on Chippewa Avenue.

ReadingBy the end of the war Studebaker had built the trucks that carried a good part of the Red Army to Berlin, and the engines that flew a good part of the American bombers over Germany. It came out of the war with money, a famous name and a plant in good order. The third part of this series tells what happened next.

Story or record? Play along

Now that you have read the record, try these six. For each claim, make your call: true, false, or no record either way. Then see what the record says.

Questions we answered

A timeline

• 1864 The government’s first great wagon order
• 1868 Studebaker Brothers Manufacturing Company incorporated
• 1871 New works begun south of the Lake Shore railroad
• 1872 The wooden works burn, 17 June
• 1874 Second fire, 24 August; more than 2,000 wagons lost
• 1879 20,000 vehicles built in a year
• 1885 The Chicago repository on Michigan Avenue opens
• 17 years later
• 1902 First electric runabout sold, 12 February
• 1904 First gasoline car sold, 22 July
• 1911 The Studebaker Corporation formed, 14 February
• 1920 The last farm wagons
• 1923 Assembly Building 84 built
• 1933 Receivership, 18 March; Erskine dies, 1 July
• 1935 Reorganization approved, 28 January
• 1941–45 US6 trucks, Weasels and Cyclone engines

If you go

DocumentedThe Studebaker National Museum at 201 South Chapin Street shows the presidential carriages, the wagons and the wartime vehicles. Building 84 still stands on the old works site south of downtown, part of the redevelopment called the Renaissance District. The Studebaker-Bendix Heritage Trail, a self-guided drive of about ninety minutes, links the old company sites from downtown to Bendix Woods.