The first sellers: the wagon maker's repositories

1852 - 1912

The repository system: South Bend's dealer trade does not begin with a bicycle shop changing trades, as Fort Wayne's does. It begins inside the factory. Henry and Clement Studebaker opened their blacksmith shop in South Bend on 16 February 1852 with sixty-eight dollars and two forges, and as the wagon works grew, the company sold through repositories: company repositories in the great cities and selling agencies in the towns. Peter E. Studebaker opened the first repository for the sale of Studebaker vehicles at St. Joseph, Missouri, the great western outfitting point, an opening the county history of 1907 still thought worth recording four decades later. By 1907 the branch houses stood in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Kansas City, Portland, Salt Lake City, Denver and Dallas, and the same account claimed more than ten thousand selling agencies penetrating almost every corner of the civilized world. A Studebaker dealer, in the wagon age, was a man who kept the company's vehicles on his floor and its name over his door, and there were thousands of him before there was a single automobile to sell.

The first sales: When the company entered the automobile business, it sold the new machines through the network it already had, and its president's own history kept the first receipts. The first electric runabout Studebaker produced was sold on 12 February 1902 to F. W. Blees of Macon, Missouri. The first gasoline car, a sixteen horsepower two cylinder machine, was sold on 22 July 1904 to H. D. Johnson of South Bend, Indiana: the first gasoline Studebaker went to a hometown buyer. In the seven years that followed, the company built and sold 2,481 passenger cars and trucks, the chassis made on contract by another company, the bodies produced in its own South Bend plants and final assembly completed there. The first gasoline automobiles fully manufactured by Studebaker were marketed in August 1912. The pattern was set in that decade and it held for sixty years: South Bend made the car, and a dealer network the wagon trade had built sold it.

Sources:

1. Albert Russel Erskine, History of the Studebaker Corporation (1918): the 1852 opening, the first electric sale of 12 February 1902 and the first gasoline sale of 22 July 1904, the 1904-1911 production and sales figures.
2. Timothy E. Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana, vol. 1 (1907): Peter E. Studebaker's St. Joseph repository, the branch house addresses, the ten thousand agencies.
3. The Clio, Studebaker Factory entry (the St. Joseph dealership dated to 1865).