The wagon trade: a continent first

1852 — 1904

The first export market was the West: The Studebaker works began in 1852 as a blacksmith shop that built two wagons in its first year, and the trade it built was outward from the start — westward, along the emigrant roads. Peter E. Studebaker established a branch at St. Joseph, Missouri, then the great outfitting point where wagon trains were made up for the plains, and Erskine's company history records the enormous business done there selling wagons to the migration. The government became a customer early: Timothy Howard's 1907 county history, written while the founders' generation still lived, records that "the government in 1864 gave them their first great order" — Union Army wagons in the Civil War, the beginning of a military trade that runs through this whole file. The scale the trade reached is in Howard's own summary: from two wagons in 1852 to "more than one hundred thousand vehicles of every description" made and sold in 1904, from a factory covering more than a hundred acres, employing more than three thousand workmen and consuming more than fifty million feet of lumber a year. The Chicago Tribune's trade account of 1882 had already named the works "the largest wagon and carriage builders in the world," turning out 25,000 farm, freight and spring wagons a year at the wagon works alone — "more than twice as many as are made by any other establishment." A factory that size does not sell to one country, and the next entries follow its goods abroad; the works itself, and the firm, are carried in full in the Studebaker section of this history.

Sources:

1. Timothy E. Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907) — the 1864 first great government order; two wagons in 1852 against more than 100,000 vehicles in 1904; the hundred acres, three thousand workmen and fifty million feet of lumber.
2. Albert Russel Erskine, History of the Studebaker Corporation (1918), as reproduced in the St. Joseph County record — Peter E. Studebaker's branch at St. Joseph, Missouri, the outfitting point, and the business done there.
3. Chicago Tribune, 30 July 1882, on the Studebaker Brothers' Chicago depository — "the largest wagon and carriage builders in the world," 25,000 farm, freight and spring wagons a year, the trade extending "from the Atlantic to the Pacific."
4. Studebaker — the firm and the works in full, cross-referenced and not retold here.