The wagon works as a system

1852–1909

The second engine of the transformation ate forests and exhaled wagons: Howard's 1907 history, in the Studebaker sketch written by Col. Charles Arthur Carlisle, measures the wagon works as an industrial metabolism: more than 100 acres of ground, more than 3,000 workmen, more than 50,000,000 feet of lumber consumed, thousands of tons of bar iron and steel, and — the figure that made the city famous — more than 100,000 vehicles manufactured and sold in a single year. Carlisle sets the endpoints side by side: in 1852, two wagons built; in 1904, more than one hundred thousand vehicles of every description made and sold. The company had been incorporated in 1868 as a stock company with a capital of $75,000. A works on that scale is not a bigger blacksmith shop; it is a logistics system with a factory attached, drawing seasoned timber from the lake country, iron and steel from the mills, and paint, canvas, leather and hardware from a national market, and shipping a finished vehicle out for every few minutes of the working year.

Its hazards were the system's hazards, and Howard records them in the same chapter: in 1872 the frame factory north of the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern Railway burned completely, a loss of $80,000, and the works were erected anew south of the railroad on the present site; in 1874 they burned again, $350,000 in loss including 2,400 finished wagons, and the brick rebuilding nearly doubled the capacity. The federal census takers, in the entry on the transformation's count below, would eventually rank what the system added up to: by 1909 South Bend stood first among Indiana cities in the manufacture of carriages and wagons, contributing more than one-third of the whole state's output. The company's own story — the five brothers, the Civil War contracts, the turn to automobiles — is the Studebaker section's. Here the works matters as the second of the three engines: the plow works pulled the iron trades to the west race, and the wagon works pulled the wood, paint, trim and wheel trades to the south side, and between them they made a labor market that every other manufacturer in this record hired from.

Sources:

1. Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana, Vol. 1 (1907), ch. V, sec. 1 (sketch by Col. Charles Arthur Carlisle) — the works' 100-plus acres, 3,000-plus workmen, 50,000,000 feet of lumber, 100,000 vehicles in a year, the 1852 and 1904 endpoints, the 1868 incorporation at $75,000 capital, and the fires of 1872 and 1874.
2. Thirteenth Census of the United States, Vol. IX, Manufactures 1909, Indiana chapter, p. 311 — South Bend first in the state in carriages and wagons, over one-third of the state's output.
3. This build's Studebaker section — the company's full record, cross-referenced and not retold.