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ITEM 1 · MIXED — THE COUNTY CLAIMS DUG AT BOUNDARY SIZE; THE TOWN'S FIRST A NAMED GAP
No first-automobile claim for Osceola — no named first owner, first machine, or first drive through the village — appears in any record reached for this build: not in the Businesses leg's directory and press sweep, which tests dealers and garages and finds none in the 1916–17 canvass; not in the Transportation leg, which opens with the railroad and the 1833 road and carries the highway course without a first-car beat; and not in the open record searched in November 2026. A first that cannot be named cannot be crowned, and this article prints the claims at the level where claims exist — the county — states what each proves, and leaves the town's first as the named gap it is.
Three county claims compete, and they crown three different things. The experiment claim: in 1896–97, at Frederick Fish's urging, the Studebaker board spent $4,000 on an experimental horseless vehicle, and in 1897–98 the South Bend works were building bodies for the electric hansom cabs of Colonel Albert Pope's Electric Vehicle Company — a claim to the county's first motor-vehicle work, seated in a factory, not on a road. The electric claim: the first Studebaker motor vehicle, an electric runabout, was sold on 12 February 1902, to F. W. Blees of Macon, Missouri — a claim to first production sale, and the buyer was not local. The gasoline claim: the first Studebaker gasoline car, a 16-horsepower two-cylinder machine on a Garford chassis, was sold on 22 July 1904 to H. D. Johnson of South Bend — the strongest "first automobile in the county" the record reached supports, and it is a purchase record for the city of South Bend. Osceola's motorists enter the surviving record the way township motorists everywhere in this build do — undated as individuals, visible first as a class in the licensing system the BMV leg carries.
GAP-OS86-1 — The first automobile owned or driven in Osceola or Penn Township. Settlers: J. Harold Kiracofe, History of Osceola (Osceola Historical Society, 1988), the town's own history and the natural home of a first-car telling; the Mishawaka Enterprise and South Bend Tribune automobile pages of the first decade. Until one of them names a man and a machine, the town's first automobile is unrecorded, and this section crowns none.
Sources: Businesses and Transportation legs of this build (no first-car claim; no garage in the 1916–17 canvass). Register row #577 and its named settlers, above.