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LEG 28 · ITEM 4 · RUN B #142
The county's industrial fame has one great ground, and it is a test track in the county's northwest: in 1926 the Studebaker Corporation bought some 850 acres (the Register nomination and one carrier give 840) near New Carlisle and built one of the first controlled automobile proving grounds in America — a "million-dollar outdoor laboratory," in the company's own promotion. Its fame mechanism stands west of its clubhouse: in 1938 the Civilian Conservation Corps planted more than 8,000 pine trees in letters 200 feet across and 250 feet long, spelling S-T-U-D-E-B-A-K-E-R over a half-mile — a sign written for airplanes, legible only from the air, planted as a salute to the growing aviation industry and used for years as a pilots' landmark. The sign was entered in the 1987 Guinness book as the largest living advertising sign in the world; the clubhouse and tree sign together were listed on the National Register in 1985, and county parks crews still clear and replant to keep the letters readable — the South Bend Tribune marked the proving ground's and clubhouse's centennial in October 2026, a hundred years on, with the track still at work under its succession of owners (Studebaker to Bendix in 1966, then Bosch, then Navistar — International in the Tribune's latest naming) and the sign's acres kept as Bendix Woods County Park. One carrier dates the planting 1937 against the nomination's and marker's 1938; the conflict prints whole. The signature objects of the county's industry, meanwhile, live indoors: the presidential carriages and the last Studebaker built stand in the Studebaker National Museum (museums addendum, item 7) — fame's objects in a museum, fame's sign still growing on its ground.
This ground's own industrial seats were tested for fame and return a true negative: Osceola's mill seat on Baugo Creek — one dam answering for both mills from the 1830s — and the interurban power house the Indiana Railway built at Osceola in 1899–1900 are carried whole in this build as industry. No fame mechanism attaches to either in any record reached: no world's-largest, no record book, no visiting public, no name known outside the county's own histories. They are locally foundational and nationally unfamous, and the leg prints them at exactly that size rather than borrowing the proving ground's light.
Verdict, item 4 — MIXED. DUG at boundary size: the proving ground and tree sign whole. TESTED NEGATIVE on this ground: industrial fame, at fame size, for the mill seat and the power house.
Sources: National Register nomination, Studebaker Clubhouse and Tree Sign (npgallery.nps.gov — planting 1938, CCC, letters' dimensions, listed 1985); St. Joseph County Parks marker text (hmdb.org — 850 acres, 1926; Guinness 1987); South Bend Tribune, 11 Oct 2026 (centennial; ownership succession); The Drive (proving ground 1926; sign half-mile); The Story of Osceola (power house, 1899–1900). Searches run 11 Nov 2026.