The first show: the South Bend and Mishawaka Auto Trade Association, 1916

May 1916 · reported in the South Bend News-Times, 4 May 1916

The show: The first automobile show of any consequence in the two cities opened on Wednesday, 3 May 1916, and it was a Mishawaka event as much as a South Bend one. It began with a procession: upwards of two hundred automobiles, forming a line nearly two miles long, led by a Ford touring car carrying South Bend's mayor and Mishawaka's chief of police, parading from the north pumping station on Michigan Street through the principal streets of both cities, with two bands playing — one from each city — in a parade that lasted over three hours. The show itself ran four days, and because no building in either city was large enough to hold a tenth of the cars companies wanted to show, it was held where the trade actually lived: in the various garages and showrooms of the two cities, each dealer exhibiting on his own floor. The paper put the value of the cars shown at between half a million and a million dollars, and recorded that the Ford and Studebaker companies made the largest showings. A second parade closed the show on Saturday.

The association: The show's organizer was a body the News-Times describes as recently organized — the South Bend and Mishawaka Auto Trade Association, a joint dealers' association of the two cities, formed in or shortly before the spring of 1916. It is the first dealers' institution the record names for either city, and its first documented act was a two-city one: Mishawaka's sellers were inside the trade's organized life from its first page, not appended to it later. The association's later course is not documented in the sources read; its minute books and later show records, if they survive, and the South Bend Tribune's morgue are the settling sources, and the show's own exhibitor lists stand in the News-Times' special automobile section of that week, named here as the source that would name Mishawaka's 1916 exhibitors firm by firm.

Sources:

1. South Bend News-Times, 4 May 1916 (Hoosier State Chronicles, Indiana's digital newspaper program) — "Half Million in Autos Shown": the two-hundred-car parade, the Ford touring car leading with South Bend's mayor and Mishawaka's police chief, the two bands, the four-day show held in the garages and showrooms of both cities for want of a hall, the value put on the cars shown, Ford and Studebaker the largest showings, and the recently organized South Bend and Mishawaka Auto Trade Association as the show's organizer.