The Company Museum Line Whole: Studebaker Collects Itself — and the Mishawaka Test

The company museum is the form in which a firm collects itself, and the county's whole line belongs to one firm across the river. The Studebaker Corporation kept its historic vehicles as a company collection while it still built cars — wagons and automobiles reaching back to the family's Conestoga wagon, and the carriages of Presidents Lincoln, McKinley, Harrison and Grant. When automobile production ended, the corporation gave the collection and the company archives to the City of South Bend in 1966. The museum's own published histories give the gift in two counts, and both print here whole: its Permanent Collections page states a 33-vehicle collection, the "Original Collection"; its Collections and Exhibits page states a 37-piece collection given with the archives. The wandering years followed the form's whole course: the collection was housed in turn in the former Studebaker Administration Building, in Century Center, and in the former Freeman-Spicer Studebaker dealership, before the present building at 201 Chapin Street opened in 2005 on the museum campus it shares with The History Museum — the two together styled The Museums at Washington and Chapin. The museum itself incorporated as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in 1982, and the collection has grown past 120 vehicles, some 85 on display at a time. That is the line whole: a company collecting itself, the founding gift dated, the wandering years, the national museum as it stands. The Mishawaka test runs against it and returns the city's characteristic negative. No Mishawaka firm kept a museum of itself — not the Mishawaka Woolen Company through its Ball Band and Uniroyal lives, whose record ends in the 1997 closure and the implosion of 17 June 2000 without a collection; not Dodge, not Wheelabrator, not the breweries. The city's industrial memory was kept instead by the historical museum, the library's Heritage Room and the DOC collection the museums fragment carries — institutions of the public, not of the firms. The company museum is a South Bend form; Mishawaka's companies are collected, where they are collected at all, by other hands.