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Founders & Chief Executives · The people who started South Bend's companies, and the executives who ran them
South Bend's business history is usually told as a history of firms — the wagon works, the plow works, the brake plant, the bank. This section tells it as a history of people: the traders who bought the townsite, the five brothers who divided a wagon company the way a family divides a farm, the foundry partners whose joint patent made the prairie farmable, the twin machinists who built the world's lathe in one rented room, and the imported founder who made the city's second industrial fortune and lost both it and his company. After the founders come the chief executives who founded nothing and defined everything: the president who expanded Studebaker into receivership and his own death, the two sales-and-production men who received the wreck and handed back a company, the banker who rescued the city's bank with his own money in 1931, and the modern chiefs of the houses that survive. Some of these people are profiled in the People sections at civic size; here they stand at the size of their founding acts and their runs. The university's founder, Father Sorin, stands in the Notre Dame section and is pointed to here only. Fortunes — the estates, the valuations, the ruins priced — are the Wealth section's, cross-referenced and not repeated.
Alexis Coquillard — the trader the town grew on
born Detroit, 28 September 1795 · died South Bend, 1855
The founding act: Alexis Coquillard established his trading post at the south bend of the St. Joseph River in the early 1820s — the record carries the settling season as 1823 and as 1824, and both stand — and his station, Big St.…
Lathrop M. Taylor — the second founder
the townsite purchase, 1831
The founding act: Lathrop Minor Taylor is the second name on the town's founding instrument: with Coquillard he bought the townsite when the cessions made it buyable and platted South Bend in 1831. Where Coquillard's founding was…
The five Studebaker brothers — the founding, divided
the shop opened 16 February 1852 · the company incorporated 26 March 1868
The myth and the record: The lone-genius version of Studebaker does not survive its own company history. Five brothers founded and ran the house, and the record divides the credit plainly: two opened the shop, one financed its…
Frederick S. Fish — the son-in-law who motorized the house
married into the firm 1891 · president to July 1915
The founder's second act: Frederick S. Fish married Grace Studebaker, John M. Studebaker's daughter, in 1891, and became the bridge between the wagon house and the automobile company. From 1895 he urged the development of "a…
Albert Russel Erskine — the chief executive the Depression killed
president, July 1915 – March 1933
Not a founder: Albert Russel Erskine founded nothing in South Bend. He is in this section because no chief executive who merely ran a South Bend house ever ran one further, or ended worse. He succeeded Fred Fish as president of…
Paul G. Hoffman and Harold S. Vance — the receivers who handed back a company
receivers 1933 · president and chairman from 9 March 1935
The rescue: The receivership Erskine left passed to the two sales-and-production men of the 1920s company. Paul G. Hoffman had been the corporation's most successful distributor before he came to South Bend in 1925 as vice…
The last chiefs — Nance, Hurley, Egbert, Burlingame
1954 – 9 December 1963
The merger's chief: When Studebaker combined with Packard on 1 October 1954, the Studebaker-Packard Corporation was formed under Packard's president, James J. Nance. The combination is described in the records of both companies…
James Oliver and Harvey Little — the foundry quarter-shares
the foundry bought May 1855 · the patent 30 June 1857
The founding, shared: James Oliver was born 28 August 1823 at Newcastleton, Scotland, and came to America with his family in 1835. He learned iron work in Indiana, and in May 1855 he and a fellow molder, Harvey Little, each…
Joseph D. Oliver — the heir who ran it
born 20 August 1850 · president 1908 – 1929 · died 6 August 1933
The founder and the heir, distinguished: Joseph Doty Oliver was the marketer to his father's inventor, in the family historian's pairing. He was born 20 August 1850 at Mishawaka, while the family still lived there, and began work…
John Comly Birdsell — the Quaker farmer who mechanized the clover field
31 March 1815 – 13 July 1894 · shops built in South Bend, 1863
The founding act: John Comly Birdsell, a farmer of West Henrietta, New York, invented in 1855 a single machine that threshed clover, separated the stems, hulled the seed, and cleaned it in one operation — work previously done by…
A. C. Staley and the Stephenson brothers — wool first, then underwear
the Staley mill, 1863 · the Stephenson name from 1907
The founding: The line begins with the A. C. Staley Woolen Mill, established on the East Race in 1863 and grown by 1889, the year of Staley's death, into a complex of buildings carried on by his son Marion and other stockholders…
Leighton Pine — Singer's man, and the works he kept in South Bend
sent to South Bend, 1868
A founder by commission: Leighton Pine founded no company of his own; he founded South Bend's second-largest works as another company's agent, and then kept it here against his own employer's second thoughts. In the 1860s the…
Frederick Badet and John Teel — two men and a croquet set
begun 1874 · the name from 1888
The founding act: In 1874 a grocery clerk, Frederick H. Badet, and a woodworker, John W. Teel, began making croquet balls, mallets, and stakes by hand in their spare time, on the old Mill Race. Croquet was one of the few outdoor…
The dry-goods founders — George Wyman, George Robertson, and the Welber brothers
Wyman's store from 1878 · Robertson's from 1904 · the Welber purchase, 1932
Wyman's: George Wyman and Company — Wyman's, to the whole city — was the South Bend dry-goods institution: on The History Museum's count its run was 112 years, and its store at 107–109 North Michigan Street dated from 1878.…
Frank Worden and Jacob Kuntz — the bait company
Worden's lures from the 1890s · the South Bend Bait Company from January 1909
The founding act: Frank G. Worden made bucktail fly lures at home in South Bend in the 1890s, on several accounts, and appears in the city directory for the first time as proprietor of the Worden Bait Company in 1901. The…
Clement Studebaker Jr. and George M. Studebaker — the watch company
the purchase 1903 (one account, 1902) · closed 27 November 1929
The second generation buys a works: In 1903, on the standard account — the NAWCC company history compiled by Warren H. Riddle dates the purchase to 1902, and both stand — Clement Studebaker Jr. and George Studebaker bought the…
John J. and Miles W. O'Brien — the lathe twins
born Cork, Ireland, 1868 · the company founded 1906
The founding act: John J. and Miles W. O'Brien, identical twins born in Cork, Ireland, in 1868, founded their company in 1906 as the South Bend Machine Tool Company: one room, thirty by sixty feet, in the Dinan Building at…
Vincent Bendix — the founder who lost his company
born Moline, Illinois, 12 August 1882 · the Bendix Corporation from 1924
The founding, placed exactly: Vincent Hugo Bendix was born 12 August 1882 in Moline, Illinois, the son of a Swedish Methodist minister. Working in New York, in a rented room over a horse stable, he built an unsuccessful motorized…
The founding bankers — Stanfield, Seixas, Brownfield, Blanchard, and the rest
1838 – 1941
The branch era: South Bend's first bank was secured, not founded in the modern sense: Dr. John A. Henricks, Thomas D. Baird and George Crawford worked to land a branch of the State Bank of Indiana, and when the branch's stock was…
Ernest M. Morris — the banker who rescued the bank
the Associates founded 1917 · died May 1951
The founding, from a hundred dollars: Notre Dame's own account of Ernest M. Morris begins at the smallest figure in this record after the Studebakers' $68: an orphan without funds, Morris received a $100 loan in 1905 from the…
Peter Veldman and Mike Joines — the Tire Rack
founded 1979 · the Discount Tire purchase closed 31 December 2021
The founding: Tire Rack was founded in 1979 in Indianapolis by Peter Veldman and his wife Wilma, beginning as a single retail tire store; their son-in-law Mike Joines joined them in the business. The People section's account…
Irwin Press and Rod Ganey — the professors who measured the patient
founded 1985
The founding act: Press Ganey was founded in 1985 by Irwin Press and Rod Ganey, two professors at the University of Notre Dame, on the company's own history: the belief that when organizations listen to people, they can make…
Phil Newbold and Kreg Gruber — the health system's chiefs
Newbold's thirty years to 1 November 2017 · Gruber from 2017
A founder by affiliation: Beacon Health System was not founded in a garage; it was founded by a chief executive's act of combination. Philip A. Newbold had come to Memorial Hospital of South Bend from the chief executive's office…
Ernestine Raclin and Christopher J. Murphy III — the Morris line's modern chiefs
the bank E. M. Morris rescued, in the family's third and fourth hands
The daughter: Ernestine Morris Carmichael Raclin (1927–2023), E. M. Morris's daughter, became chairman of 1st Source Bank — the institution her father had rescued and presided over — and from that chair ran a second career of…
The second rank, in brief — and the gaps this record names
1852 – the present
The wagon shops beside the giant: The Winkler brothers — three brothers who began at the anvil and bench — incorporated on 29 October 1902, with $75,000 capital, as the Winkler Brothers' Manufacturing Company; in 1919 Vincent…