South Bend Dealerships: The Lots That Sold the Cars

The Dealerships · The houses that sold South Bend its cars

Every other city in this record bought its cars from men who sold what distant factories built. South Bend built its own. For a hundred and eleven years the wagons, and then the cars, rolled out of the Studebaker works on the south side of downtown, and the men who sold them worked streets a short walk from the gates: Lafayette Boulevard, Western Avenue, Main Street. That makes the South Bend dealer trade a different animal from Fort Wayne's. Its first sellers were the factory's own repositories and branch houses. Its most successful dealer became the factory's sales chief. Its hometown Studebaker store is remembered well enough that the national museum rebuilt its showroom as an exhibit, and when the factory closed in 1963, two of its local dealers bought a piece of it and kept its flagship car alive for two more decades. What follows is that trade as history: the wagon network that became a dealer network, Automobile Row, the war that emptied the showrooms, the factory's last day, and the family houses of the second age, on Jefferson Boulevard, Grape Road and Ireland Road, that started a long time ago and are still around. The founding dates the houses publish for themselves are printed as they give them; where the public record brackets a founding without fixing it, the bracket is printed and the gap is named.