The Mishawaka building before the Humvee

to 1974

A Rockwell building: The Mishawaka plant is older than the company that made it famous, and older than the vehicle it is known for. On the specialist record — Military Trader's company-sourced photographic history of AM General — the building was originally built by Rockwell to supply components for Studebaker automobiles. When Studebaker's South Bend car production ended in 1963 the components trade ended with it, and the building passed to Kaiser-Jeep, which bought the facility to produce cargo and dump truck beds for its military trucks; the General Products Division used it for the same purpose. The transit-bus history dates Kaiser-Jeep's Mishawaka truck-body use to 1969, and the specialist company history describes the plant at the 1970 AMC purchase as "recently acquired" and 300,000 square feet.

Underused: The bus history's judgment on those years is plain: the facility had been "largely underutilized since it was acquired by Kaiser-Jeep to house production of military cargo and dump bodies in 1969." Truck beds were a sideline to the truck plants at Chippewa, and the Mishawaka building waited for a product of its own. It got one in 1974, when AM General's diversification into transit buses put assembly in the underused plant — and the building's conversion then, and again a decade later, is the reason reference works that describe AM General "building" a Mishawaka factory in 1984 are telling only the last third of the building's story.

Sources:

1. Military Trader (Doyle), "The Birth of AM General," with AM General photograph — the Rockwell origin, the Kaiser-Jeep purchase for cargo and dump truck beds, the conversions to buses and then to HMMWVs, the 300,000-square-foot figure at the AMC purchase.
2. BusTalk / transit-bus history of the AM General Metropolitan — Kaiser-Jeep's 1969 truck-body use and the plant's underutilization.