The Sixty-Eight Dollars and the Wagon That Ran Thirty-Three Years

1852 · the founding tale, in its printings of 1907, 1918 and 2002

The founding as the county history prints it: Howard's History (1907) states it in the sentence every telling since has quoted: “With sixty-eight dollars in cash and stock-in-trade, these two boys opened a blacksmith shop in South Bend” — Henry and Clement Studebaker, in February 1852, at Main and Jefferson. Eleven years later Albert Russell Erskine, the corporation's president, wrote the company's own history (1918) and kept the number: “with a capital of sixty-eight dollars and equipped with two forges and a limited supply of tools, they engaged in the business of blacksmithing. The first year they made two wagons and several sets of wagon gear.” Between the county history and the company history the founding tale was already fixed at its canonical size — sixty-eight dollars — while the firm it founded was the largest vehicle-maker on earth. That disproportion is the tale; it is why the number is remembered and the ledgers are not.

The wagon: both printings carry the same second ornament, and it is the better story. Howard: of the first wagons built, “one of these wagons was found in daily use thirty-three years afterwards.” Erskine, eleven years on, with the company archive behind him: “One of the wagons was in constant daily use for thirty-three years.” A wagon that outworked a generation is the blacksmith's version of the mushroom man — it appears in both founding documents, and no telling since has been able to leave it out. The later embroidery sorts itself by date and stands here as embroidery: a present-day retelling in Farm Collector adds the first day's earning of twenty-five cents for shoeing one horse, a first shop beside a pond that caught fire and burned to the water's edge, and the first wagon taking seven days to build and selling for $175, its box painted green and its running gear red with “Studebaker” in big yellow letters — details its own telling floors with the words “one account says.” The record this section was able to reach contains no earlier printing of them; the sixty-eight dollars and the thirty-three-year wagon stand in 1907 and 1918, and the paint stands in the telling of our own century, labeled as what it is.

The boundary: the firm, its ledgers, its closing and its pensions are documented in this history's Studebaker section. What lives here is the tale the city tells about its own beginning — that South Bend's industrial century started with sixty-eight dollars, two forges, and a wagon that would not wear out — told, for once, with papers nearly as good as the story.

Sources:

1. Timothy E. Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), part 64 — “With sixty-eight dollars in cash and stock-in-trade, these two boys opened a blacksmith shop in South Bend”; “one of these wagons was found in daily use thirty-three years afterwards.”
2. Albert Russell Erskine, History of the Studebaker Corporation (South Bend: Studebaker Corporation, 1918) — “a capital of sixty-eight dollars,” two forges, two wagons the first year; “One of the wagons was in constant daily use for thirty-three years.”
3. Sam Moore, “Let's Talk Rusty Iron,” Farm Collector — the twenty-five-cent first day, the burning shop by the pond, the seven-day wagon at $175 painted green, red and yellow, attributed in the telling itself: “one account says.”