Mishawaka Automobiles: The Makers and the Parts Trade

Automobiles · The makers: a two-stroke luxury car, its 1916 successor, a 1920 assembled six, and the parts trade

South Bend made Studebakers, and the question this section answers is what, if anything, Mishawaka made. The answer the record gives is not the one the city's own trade suggests at first glance: the dealerships file of this history, working from the sellers' directories, opens with the statement that Mishawaka never built cars in the brass era. The marque record says otherwise, and says it in the standard registers. Mishawaka built cars. Between 1906 and 1915 — or from 1904, on the dating two of the accounts give — the Simplex Motor Car Company of Mishawaka manufactured a large, expensive, technically singular automobile, the American Simplex, renamed Amplex in 1910, powered by a valveless two-stroke engine of the company's own design when every serious rival had gone to four strokes. Two of its cars ran in the first Indianapolis 500, and the worse of their two afternoons gave the Speedway the first death in its 500-mile history. When the company failed, its plant passed in 1916 to the Gillette Motors Company, whose 1916 car Doyle's register records under the Gillette name. Four years later a second Mishawaka marque, the Kenworthy — a Continental-engined assembled six on a 130-inch wheelbase, priced with the luxury field — was advertised from this city in the trade's own data book and in the local press. The brass-era record is therefore three names deep, and the entries below carry each at the size its record supports, with the disagreements among the sources printed where they fall. Around the makers stand the section's other tests: the firsts, of which some settle and one does not; the parts trade, where the city's documented automobile-component manufacture turns out to be real but later and narrower than the makers' era — rubber mats, cushions and seating fabrics from the Ball Band works, not tires and not engines; the carriage crossover, which Mishawaka's one great wagon house performed only after it had left for Toledo; and the modern line, AM General's, which stands whole in its own section and is pointed to here, closing with the state of vehicle manufacture on Mishawaka ground as verified in November 2026.

The founding automobiles file settled what Mishawaka made: three marques in the standard register — the American Simplex, renamed Amplex in 1910; the Gillette that succeeded it in the same plant in 1916; and the Kenworthy of 1920. Three questions the founding pass did not reach stand open at the close of this section, and this addendum closes them in order. Was there ever a car the record does not list — a prototype, a one-off, a works secret built on Mishawaka ground? Where, street by street, did the automobile first take hold of the city's ground? And what did the city do with the car once the car was simply life — where is its cruise? Each question is answered from the record, at the size the record gives it, and where the record gives nothing the negative is printed whole, with the searches that produced it named.

The secret / one-off car test: the candidates named, and the verdict negative

The pattern the test is run against stands across the river: in 1934 the Bendix Products works in South Bend built the Bendix SWC, a streamlined steel proof-of-concept car, one car, made to demonstrate a bundle of Bendix components and kept out of the ordinary marque record for decades. That car is South Bend's, and it stands here at boundary size only, as the shape of the thing being asked for. The question for Mishawaka is whether the Amplex works — a plant that designed its own two-stroke engine when the industry had abandoned the type, and kept racing after the production logic for racing had thinned — ever produced its equivalent: a prototype, a coachbuilt one-off, or a works special that the marque lists do not carry.

The test was run against the marque record and the press. Doyle's register, read first-hand for the founding file, carries exactly three Mishawaka entries — American Simplex, Amplex, and Kenworthy — and no fourth, experimental or otherwise. The Simplex marque histories (the marque record as carried in the standard references and the dedicated marque history) run from the company's organization by E. J. Gulick and H. L. Bell, the car marketed from 1904, the three-point suspension and the four-cylinder two-stroke, the 1908 runabout speedster, the 1910 renaming to Amplex, and the 1911 Indianapolis racing version on the lengthened 124-inch frame that finished eighth — a full experimental line, and every step of it a production or racing development of the listed car. No prototype standing outside the line, no secret car, is named anywhere in that record. The 1913 four-stroke the company offered when the two-stroke failed to sell is a listed production variant, not a one-off.

Three candidates present themselves and are excluded by name. First: the hand-built cars of Adolph Kamm. After M. W. Hand-built is not one-off: these were continued production of an existing, registered design, in small numbers, after the company's formal end. They are the tail of the marque, not a car outside it. Second: the 1908 American Simplex Model D-50 roadster the collector record describes as "built as a race car but not completed by the factory." A works race preparation of a production model, left unfinished, is racing-shop material of a kind every brass-era maker generated; it is not a prototype of an unlisted car, and the two stock-chassis racers the factory did complete ran openly in the first Indianapolis 500, in the full press light of the day. Third: the Gillette of 1916, which succeeded Amplex in the plant with its rotary sleeve-valve engine — unusual engineering, but a listed production car in Doyle, carrying the plant's second marque, not a secret.

Verdict: tested negative. No prototype, one-off, or secret car built on Mishawaka ground appears in the marque record or the press searches run for this test (the marque registers and Simplex marque histories; the collector record for surviving cars; press searches on the Amplex and Simplex names joined to prototype, experimental, and one-off). Mishawaka's works were, if anything, the opposite of secretive: their singularity — the valveless two-stroke — was the advertising. The settler, if the negative is ever to be moved, is the works' own paper: factory and engineering records of the Simplex Motor Car Company and Amplex, and the Mishawaka Enterprise run for the plant years, neither of which has produced a candidate in any search to date.

The street record: the garages and agencies on their streets

The dealerships file owns the sellers and carries the directory evidence at directory size; what it does not do is read that evidence as geography. Read as geography, the automobile arrives in Mishawaka on ground the horse trade had already worn. Johnson's Business Directory for 1902–03, in its Mishawaka section, carries no automobile listing of any kind; what it carries is the trade the car would displace, at its addresses: blacksmiths John Becker at 217 N. Main and George Becker at 111 Front, harness maker Lorenz Eberhardt at 218 N. Main and William Fisher at 112 E. Main. Main Street and its first cross streets were the vehicle ground of the city before the motor vehicle existed in its record, and the motor trade, when it comes, comes to the same streets.

The first directory census of the motor trade is Polk's South Bend city directory of 1921, Mishawaka classified section, and its geography is tight enough to walk. Exactly two sellers stand in the city. At the south end of Main, 702–04 S. Main, stands the Mishawaka Battery Service, telephone Mishawaka 225, Florian S. and Frank O. Kelley, a Westinghouse battery house that was also agent for Elgin cars — Chicago-built, sold from a battery shop. At 215–217 Lincoln Way W. stands the Mishawaka branch of W. R. Hinkle Inc., telephone Mishawaka 91, the branch of South Bend's Ford distributor, whose parent house at 223–29 N. Lafayette Boulevard in South Bend sold Fordson tractors beside Ford cars — the branch that ties this street record to the tractors leg. The same 1921 volume carries an unsettled point, printed whole as the founding file prints it: the Mishawaka section names J. F. Rupp as the branch's manager, while the South Bend section names Harry E. Hinkle, who lived at 318 W. 1st in Mishawaka. Both names stand; the record does not choose. The service trade of the same year stands at three addresses: the Mishawaka Garage at 214–16 S. Main, on the old horse-trade street; the Imperial Garage at 2301 Lincoln Way East, far out the east Lincoln Way; and the Overland Service Station behind 111 Lincoln Way West. Two axes are already visible in 1921: Main Street, inherited from the horse, and Lincoln Way — the Lincoln Highway's line through the city — which would become the auto row.

The row's course from there is the course Dealerships documents, and it is a course west and then off the highway altogether. The Ford point holds the west Lincoln Way ground: Hinkle's branch at 215–217 Lincoln Way W. in 1921, O'Neil Motor Company at 315 Lincoln Way West by 1956 with its used-car lot across at 216, and Jordan Ford at 609 E. Jefferson Blvd by 1963, off the row entirely. Gates Chevrolet stands at 202–04 Lincoln Way East by 1949 and at 666 W. McKinley Ave by 1963. The McKinley turn begins in 1950, when Brook Motor Sales opens for Studebaker at 916 E. McKinley Ave. Nye-Fulton's Lincoln-Mercury point holds Main Street as late as 1963, at 201 S. Main. By 1956 the far west Lincoln Way carries its own used-car ground — Dillon/Miller at 2102 W., Stewart's Kaiser-Frazer garage at 2720 W., the D. L. Miller lot at 2703 W. — the trade stretched the length of the highway through the city. The last hinge is 1984, when the Gurley Leep development, in partnership with the city, moves the trade's center of gravity to Grape Road, where it stands. The street record, whole: the car entered on the horse's streets, organized itself along the Lincoln Highway, thinned east–west as the highway trade matured, and left the old streets for the Grape Road commercial ground in the 1980s — the standard American course, run on Mishawaka ground at Mishawaka addresses, every step of it in the directory record.

The jitney test: tested negative

The jitney — the unlicensed or lightly licensed car-for-hire that swept American cities in 1914–16, carrying passengers for a nickel along fixed informal routes — was regulated, fought, and written about everywhere it appeared, and a city of Mishawaka's size, on a streetcar line, with an interurban labor force, is exactly the ground where the form should have appeared if it appeared anywhere in the county. The test was run in the press and directory record and in the secondary literature of the jitney era. It returns nothing for Mishawaka: no jitney operator, no jitney ordinance fight, no jitney casualty or court case on Mishawaka ground appears in any source reached. The national record (Spurr's Motor Vehicle Transportation of 1922 and the municipal-ordinance literature) carries the form's history city by city, and Mishawaka is not in it. Verdict: tested negative at the strength of the searches named. The settler is the municipal record itself — Mishawaka's ordinance books and council minutes for 1914–20 and the Mishawaka Enterprise run for those years, at the Mishawaka-Penn-Harris Public Library — where a jitney regulation, if the city ever wrote one, would have to stand.

The first gasoline sale: a named gap

Every automobile city has its first gasoline sale somewhere in its paper — a hardware store or pharmacy selling motor fuel by the can before the filling station existed, then the first pump. For Mishawaka, no source reached in the founding pass or in this addendum names it: no first sale, no first pump, no seller identified with the trade's beginning at documented size. The directory record that fixes the first sellers and garages in 1921 does not reach back to a first fuel sale, and the press searches run for this test returned no candidate. The item prints, therefore, as a named gap, not a negative: the sale certainly happened, in some store on Main Street or Lincoln Way in the years before the 1921 directory census, and the record as it stands does not say where or when. The settling sources are the Mishawaka Enterprise run for the pre-1921 years and the classified headings of the earliest Polk and Johnson directories — the advertisements of the hardware and drug trade, where motor gasoline was retailed before it had a heading of its own.

The motor-club test: no Mishawaka club of record

The motor club was the automobile's first civic institution — the touring, lobbying, road-signing association of motorists — and the test asks whether Mishawaka ever had one of its own, or an AAA presence of record. The record answers in two parts. Indiana's AAA house is the Hoosier Motor Club: organized in Indianapolis in 1902 as the Flat Tire Group, renamed the Hoosier Motor Club in 1911, affiliated with the AAA in 1917, and serving fifty of Indiana's ninety-two counties by the 1960s, from Indianapolis. It is a state body seated in the state capital; no Mishawaka club, chapter, or branch office of it appears in any source reached, and no independent Mishawaka motor club — no Automobile Club of Mishawaka, no motorists' association under the city's own name — appears either. The one organized automobile body the city's record does hold must not be mistaken for one: the South Bend and Mishawaka Auto Trade Association, which staged the two cities' first auto show from 3 May 1916 — two hundred cars, a parade nearly two miles long, the show run through the garages and showrooms of both cities for want of a hall — was a dealers' association, a sellers' body, not a club of motorists. The distinction is the finding. Mishawaka's motorists were served, from Indianapolis, by the state club; Mishawaka's sellers organized on their own. The touring era touches the city's ground once in print: Michaels' Photographic Automobile Map of the Chicago–South Bend road (1905) reaches Mishawaka only as a route instruction — cross the Jefferson street bridge at South Bend, go two miles east — the city as a direction in somebody else's tour book. Verdict: tested negative for a motor club of Mishawaka's own; the AAA presence of record is the Hoosier Motor Club at state size, Indianapolis-seated.

The cruise: the evening's room, at event size

The drive-in test stands negative in the family-entertainment and theaters file of this history — the drive-in was never Mishawaka's room — and it is pointed to here, not re-run. What the record holds instead, at the end of the city's car culture, is the cruise: the car as the evening's destination rather than its transport. It holds it at event size, and the events are datable. The fullest account is a valediction: the last cruise-in at the Mishawaka Hooters, in 2011, the final one ever held at that location before the restaurant itself closed — over 150 registered cars, the lot overflowing into the side street and two neighboring restaurant lots, judging and top-ten prizes, recorded by a participant for the Ford press (Cool Fords, "Last Hooters Cruise-In") who calls Mishawaka his hometown and writes that "we take our cruise-ins pretty seriously in Northern IN." A cruise-in series long enough to have a last one, drawing a hundred and fifty cars to a Grape Road-era parking lot, is a tradition by any plain reading — but the record names its venue and its end, not its beginning or its cadence, and it prints at that size.

The standing event is older in the city's own calendar and still current. Kamm Island Fest, the Mishawaka Business Association's festival on Kamm Island in the St. Joseph River — inaugurated in 2004, in its fifteenth year on 18 July 2018, its twenty-first annual edition on 17 July 2024, its twenty-second on 16 July 2025 — has carried a classic car show as a standing part of the festival across that run: over one hundred classics on display at the 2024 edition, the show taking registrations through the Business Association at the 2025 edition, live music and the Taste of Mishawaka beside it. A Wednesday-evening festival on an island in the river, with a hundred classic cars parked on the grass, is the cruise become a show — the cars arrived, displayed, and judged rather than driven in a loop. One club-event cruise night stands at smaller size: the Midwest Buick Challenge's cruise night at the Mishawaka Brewing Company, 3703 N. Main Street, from 7:00 p.m., run alongside the Buick event at the drag strip in the event's 2007-era schedule — a documented cruise night at a Mishawaka address, a single club's occasion, not a standing weekly course. Beyond these, the searches run for this close returned no standing weekly Mishawaka cruise night, no named cruising strip, and no street-cruising record of the kind other Indiana cities carry from the 1950s–70s: the regional club record (the Michiana Mustangs and their cruise nights) is Michiana's, not this city's. Present state, verified November 2026: the Kamm Island car show stands in the annual record, most recently at the festival of 16 July 2025; the Hooters cruise-in stands ended, 2011; no standing cruise night on Mishawaka ground is documented.

Closing statement: the city's car culture from the record as a whole

Stated whole, Mishawaka's car culture is a maker's and a seller's culture before it is a driver's. The city built cars for a decade — a luxury two-stroke of genuine technical originality, raced at Indianapolis in the first 500 at the cost of the Speedway's first life — and then, the making ended, sold and serviced cars for a century: two sellers and three garages in 1921, eight sellers by 1949, the Lincoln Way row, the McKinley turn, the Grape Road ground, and the South Bend Mishawaka Auto Auction, which moved to its present Mishawaka location in 2002 and marked its twenty-fifth anniversary sale on 30 June 2024. Its organized enthusiasms ran through the trade: the dealers' own association put on the first show in 1916, and when the Corvette came, it was Gates Chevrolet that sponsored the Michiana Corvette Club from 1957 — the club stood behind a dealership's name. What the record does not give the city is the driver's own institutions: no motor club of its own in the touring era, no drive-in in the family era, no cruising strip in the postwar record. The cruise, when it finally documents itself, documents itself as an event — a cruise-in in a restaurant lot, a car show on a festival island — arranged, dated, and judged, the car culture of a city that made and sold the things settling, in the end, into showing them. That is the close the record supports, and it is stated at the record's size: the gaps in it are the jitney and the gasoline sale and the cruising years, named above with their settlers, and they stay open until the Enterprise run and the ordinance books are read.