"The world's largest manufacturer of farm wagons" — Milburn

The billing of the Toledo years, from 1875

The claim. The Milburn Wagon Company carries in the trade literature the billing "the largest manufacturer of farm wagons in the world," and this history's automobiles and founders files carry it at the strength its carriers give it — "by the trade's own account." The company's Mishawaka chapter is short and documented: incorporated at Mishawaka on 23 August 1869, removed to Toledo in 1873, where a mechanized plant opened in the spring of 1875 and grew into the works the billing describes — some six hundred wagons a week from five hundred and fifty to six hundred men, on the trade literature's figures, with sales offices in nine American cities.

The record. Two facts test the billing, and the first is that it is not Mishawaka's. The works on the river finished its last Mishawaka year, ending 1 July 1873, with $446,652 in wagon sales, on the company's record as the coachbuilding literature preserves it — a substantial shop, and the whole of the city's share. The billing dates from the Toledo plant and the years after 1875; Mishawaka's four years precede it entire. The second fact is that the crown was already spoken for, by the same genre, in the next town west: South Bend's Studebaker proclaimed itself the largest vehicle builder in the world by 1872, on the Smithsonian's milepost of the company's history, and its documented output passed 75,000 vehicles a year by the late 1880s — more than double Milburn's billed weekly rate carried across a full year. Two houses in the same valley cannot both have been measured largest in overlapping years, and the South Bend file's test of the same sentence establishes why neither was measured at all: no enumeration of the world's wagon output exists for the 1870s, for Studebaker, for Milburn, or for anyone. What exists is billing, printed by both houses and repeated by their historians.

The verdict. Not supported as a measurement — the company's billing, and printed here as billing wherever this history repeats it. The Mishawaka chapter is stated at its true size and needs no superlative: for four years the works on the river was one of the substantial wagon shops of the lakes country, substantial enough that Toledo capital bought it and built around it the plant that made the claim. The claim itself is Toledo's, and later, and it collides there with a rival billing of exactly its own standing.

Sources:

1. Coachbuilt.com, the Milburn Wagon Company history — incorporation at Mishawaka, 23 August 1869; the Mishawaka works' year ending 1 July 1873 at $446,652 in sales; the Toledo organization of June 1873 and the plant's construction.
2. The Milburn company's modern history (milburn.us / Electric Vehicles News) — the Toledo factory's opening in the spring of 1875 and the billing "the largest manufacturer of farm wagons in the world" from that era; the trade literature's production figures (about 600 wagons a week; 550–600 employees; nine sales offices) as carried in the wagon literature.
3. This history's South Bend stories file, the Studebaker entry — the company's self-proclamation as largest vehicle builder in the world by 1872 (Smithsonian milepost); 75,000 vehicles a year by the late 1880s; the finding that no world enumeration of wagon output exists.
4. This history's automobiles and founders files — the Milburn incorporation, the Toledo removal, and the billing at its carriers' strength.