Freeman-Spicer, and the day the factory closed

To 1963 - afterlife to 2005

The hometown store: Every factory town has one dealership whose name is a synonym for the factory's cars, and in South Bend it was Freeman-Spicer. The Lafayette tour places the store at 520 South Lafayette, at the south end of Automobile Row, nearest the works, and dates the building's demolition to 2007. What lifts Freeman-Spicer out of the tour's list and into its own article is what happened to its building afterward. The Studebaker collection, deeded by the company to the city in 1966, moved through a series of homes, and for years the Studebaker National Museum was housed in the city's former Freeman-Spicer Studebaker dealership building, until 2005, when it moved to its present facility. The hometown store became the hometown museum: the cars the factory built were exhibited, for a generation, inside the showroom of the men who had sold them.

The exhibit: In 2005, in its last season in the old building, the museum made the dealership itself the subject. "Studebaker Sales: The Freeman-Spicer Dealership" re-created Freeman-Spicer's parts department, its used car showroom and a portion of its new car showroom, in the same spots where they could be found when the dealership was still in business, as the Tribune reported it, with a member of the Spicer family speaking to what the company had meant to a city where, at its peak, more than a quarter of the population depended on Studebaker for employment. No other dealership in this record, in either city, has been rebuilt inside a museum as history. The parts bar of a South Bend Studebaker store is an exhibit because the store, the factory and the city were, for a century, one story.

The closing: The story's end is dated to the day. After insufficient initial sales of the 1964 models and the ousting of president Sherwood Egbert, Studebaker announced on 9 December 1963 the closure of the South Bend plant. The last Larks and Hawks were assembled on 20 December 1963, and the last Avanti on 26 December. Production lingered in Hamilton, Ontario until the final Studebaker automobile on 17 March 1966, but for South Bend the trade's first age ended in December 1963. What happened to the dealers is written in the standard histories in one sentence: many of Studebaker's dealers either closed, took on other automakers' product lines, or converted to Mercedes-Benz dealerships. Freeman-Spicer's founding year and its founders' full names are not fixed by the sources found, and they are carried as open items rather than filled in. Its building outlived it by four decades and spent twenty years holding the factory's memory, which is the closing line the record can honestly give it.

Sources:

1. Hemmings, Studebaker National Museum profile, 16 August 2018 (archivist Andrew Beckman: the museum was housed in the former Freeman-Spicer Studebaker dealership building up to 2005).
2. South Bend Tribune, 2005, indexed by the Michiana Business Review Library (the Freeman-Spicer exhibit: the re-created parts department and showrooms, the Spicer family's remarks).
3. Round the Bend Now and Then, Lafayette Boulevard tour (the 520 S. Lafayette address and the 2007 demolition, tour reported).
4. The standard Studebaker histories (the 9 December 1963 closure announcement, the last South Bend cars of 20 and 26 December 1963, the final Hamilton car of 17 March 1966, and the dealers' three ways out).