The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
LEG 27 · ITEM 7 · RUN B #134 · AT BOUNDARY SIZE — THE SEAT IS SOUTH BEND'S
One company in this county collected itself for eighty years, and the line runs unbroken from a founder's purchase to a national museum: the Studebaker collection began in 1887, when Clement Studebaker bought the carriage that had carried the Marquis de Lafayette on his 1824–25 American tour; the brothers kept their father's c.1835 Conestoga wagon and added the presidential carriages (Grant's and Harrison's, and in the mid-1910s the carriage that was Abraham Lincoln's last ride), and the company's corporate museum was formalized in 1916, housed in its South Bend administration building. When the corporation died, the collection became the city's: in 1966 Studebaker deeded its vehicle collection and archives to the City of South Bend, on the city's undertaking to house and display them. The count conflicts in the carriers and prints whole: the museum's own telling, carried by the visitors bureau, gives the 1966 gift as a 33-vehicle collection; the museum's archivist Andrew Beckman, quoted in Hemmings, gives the closing collection as 37 vehicles. The wandering years followed the audit's pattern exactly: the collection remained in the administration building into the early 1970s, was displayed in the Century Center from 1977 through the late 1980s, then in the former Freeman-Spicer Studebaker dealership, until October 2005, when the Studebaker National Museum — a nonprofit corporation since 1985, and one of only three American automobile museums accredited by the American Alliance of Museums — opened its present building at 201 Chapin Street, sharing an entrance court with The History Museum. It stands there in November 2026, holding the world's largest collection of U.S. presidential carriages.
The Osceola half of the company-museum test is a printed negative: the town's long-lived firms — the Bancroft and Lang mills, the creamery, the depot trade of Businesses — left no collecting-itself record in any source reached; no Osceola company museum, archive room or centennial collection is named anywhere in the record. The county's company museum is Studebaker's alone, and it is South Bend's.
Verdict, item 7 — DUG (boundary size; the 33/37 vehicle conflict printed whole; local negative printed).
Sources: Studebaker National Museum carriers — Visit South Bend Mishawaka (1966 gift, 33 vehicles); Hemmings, museum history with archivist Andrew Beckman (collection course; 37 vehicles; homes in sequence); Mac's Motor City Garage museum visit (1966 donation). Searches run 11 Nov 2026.