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1891–1915 · SOUTH BEND (BOUNDARY) · CARRIED AS A CHIEF, NOT A FOUNDER
The pattern is verified whole for the county's flagship. Frederick Samuel Fish — "Fred Fish" — married John M. Studebaker's daughter Grace in 1891, a lawyer son-in-law entering a wagon company his wife's father and uncles had founded in 1852. It was Fish who, in 1895, urged development of "a practical horseless carriage"; on Peter Studebaker's death in 1897 he became chairman of the executive committee, with an engineer already at work on a motor vehicle; and when the Studebaker Corporation was born on 14 February 1911, Fish was its first president. He carried the house from wagons to automobiles — the transformer, exactly — and handed the presidency to Albert Erskine in July 1915, remaining chairman. He founded nothing: the firm was forty years old when he married into it, and this section carries him, as the row directs, as a chief. Plumb, married Zelotes Bancroft's daughter Alma the day after arriving in the county in 1864 and carried the mill family's other hand — the village store of 1870 — but he transformed no house, and he stands in Businesses as a merchant, not a chief. No transformer-chief stands in Osceola's record; the class belongs, on this ground, to South Bend alone.
Sources: Studebaker company record — Fish's marriage to Grace Studebaker (1891); the 1895 horseless-carriage urging; executive-committee chairman 1897; first president of Studebaker Corporation, 14 February 1911; Erskine succeeding July 1915 (the company history and the 1922 News-Times profile of Erskine agree on the succession). Studebaker Presidents roll (Rock River Valley Chapter, SDC) — "Fred Fish — Studebaker's first president, when Studebaker Corporation was born on February 14th, 1911." Banked Notable People / Businesses (Plumb).