The first automobiles: the claims stated, and no crown printed

ROW 1 · NAMED GAP — THE TOWNSHIP FIRST IS NOT IN THE RECORD REACHED

Every place of this age is owed its first-automobile test, and this ground's test returns a discipline, not a date: no first-automobile claim for Clay or Harris townships — no named first owner, first machine, or first drive on Harris Prairie — appears in any record reached for this build: not in the county histories read first-hand for the wider build (Chapman, 1880, pre-automobile; Howard, 1907, whose Harris Township section is a farm record), not in the business leg's directory and press sweep, and not in the open-web record searched in November 2026. A first that cannot be named cannot be crowned, and this article prints the competing claims at the level where claims do exist — the county's city — states what each actually proves, and leaves the township first as the named gap it is.

Three county-level claims compete, and they crown three different things. The experiment claim: in 1896 or 1897, persuaded by Frederick Fish, the Studebaker board spent $4,000 on an experimental "horseless vehicle," and in 1897–98 the South Bend works were building bodies for the electric hansom cabs of Colonel Albert Pope's Electric Vehicle Company — a claim to the county's first motor-vehicle work, seated in a factory, not on a road. The electric claim: the first Studebaker motor vehicle, an electric runabout, was sold on 12 February 1902 (to F. W. Blees of Macon, Missouri, in Erskine's corporate history) — a claim to first production sale, and the buyer was not local. The gasoline claim: the first Studebaker gasoline car, a 16-horsepower two-cylinder machine on a Garford chassis, was sold on 22 July 1904 — and this buyer was local: H. D. Johnson of South Bend, in Erskine's own record. That is the strongest "first automobile in the county" the record reached supports, and it is a purchase record for the city of South Bend, not a sighting record for the townships. Township motorists enter the surviving record the way the BMV leg prints them entering the licensing system — undated as individuals, visible first as a class: farm households applying for plates by mail from 1913, warned in 1928 against notary intermediaries, counted only in the county's plate-allocation ceilings thereafter.

GAP-AUTO-1 — the first automobile owned or driven in Clay or Harris townships. Settler: the South Bend Tribune and News-Times full text for 1895–1910 (Hoosier State Chronicles; St. Joseph County Public Library), read for the townships' names — the same papers whose 1915–1917 runs this section does cite for the motor-club record — together with the Studebaker National Museum's archives for any township delivery record. Until that read is run, no first prints for this ground, and any local tradition naming one is carried as tradition, not record.

Sources:

1. Albert Russel Erskine, History of the Studebaker Corporation (1918; archive.org full text) — the first electric runabout sold 12 February 1902 to F. W. Blees, Macon, Mo.; the first gasoline car sold 22 July 1904 to H. D. Johnson, South Bend, Ind.; the bodies-and-chassis division of the early gasoline cars.
2. Studebaker marque record (Bonsall, More Than They Promised, as summarized in the marque register reached) — the 1896/97 $4,000 experimental vehicle; bodies for the Electric Vehicle Company's hansom cabs, 1897–98.
3. BMV leg, pre-branch article — plates by mail from 1913; the 1928 notary warning; the township motorist as a class, not a name.