The wagon era beside Studebaker — Winkler Brothers and the wagon shops

Winkler Brothers incorporated 1902 – plant bought by Bendix 1919

Not the only wagon works in town:It did not. Howard's 1907 county history lists wagon-making among the city's lines from its two great families of the trade, the Studebakers and the Knoblocks, and the smaller shops stood on the same streets. The firm with the clearest afterlife is Winkler Brothers: three brothers who began at the anvil and bench and incorporated on 29 October 1902, with $75,000 capital, as the Winkler Brothers' Manufacturing Company, building a modern factory on a tract served by the Lake Shore railroad in the city's southwest. The state inventory of historic places carries the ground as the "Winkler Brothers/Bendix" site, 401 Bendix Drive, built out 1902–1930 — the two names in one entry, because in 1919 the wagon works was bought, as the Winkler-Grimm Wagon Company in the Bendix histories, by Vincent Bendix, whose brake empire is the next entry but one. The wagon shop became the seed plant of the aviation age.

The other wagon shell: The Miller-Knoblock Wagon Company's factory on South High Street, photographed in 1894 with its wagons lined in the yard, was built for E. G. Knoblock's wagon works; when the wagon trade died, the building went to the South Bend Bait Company about 1920 (above), and survives in use today. Two of the city's three documented wagon shells thus ended the twentieth century holding other trades — brakes in one, fishing tackle in the other.

Sources:

1. Timothy E. Howard, History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), from the incorporated-companies record — the Winkler Brothers' Manufacturing Company, capitalized at $75,000, incorporated 29 October 1902, the brothers' trade arc from the anvil to the carriage works, and the new factory on the Lake Shore tract.
2. Indiana historic-sites inventory form, "Winkler Brothers/Bendix, 401 Bendix Drive, built 1902–30" (State & National Register listings, SHAARD) — the paired naming and the construction span.
3. Round the Bend 574, the 1108 High Street building tour (2026) — the 1894 photograph of the E. G. Knoblock wagon works and its succession to the South Bend Bait Company.