The Studebaker Proving Ground and its tree sign — the name written for airplanes

1926 – present · Olive Township, near New Carlisle — county ground, printed at its true geography

The place: Twelve miles west of the city, in Olive Township, stands the ground Studebaker opened in 1926 as the first controlled outdoor proving ground built by an American automobile manufacturer — some 840 acres with a three-mile oval, banked turns and test roads, where the Army Ordnance Department also ran tests from March 1943 to June 1945. It never stopped working: Bendix leased it and then bought it in 1966, Bosch took it in 1996, and Navistar has run it since 1 April 2015. The proving ground's fame, though, is not in its pavement. In 1937 the company planted five thousand pine trees on the ground in the shape of the letters of its own name — STUDEBAKER, spelled in a living grove to be read from the air — and the sign still stands and can still be read in satellite photographs today, the largest piece of advertising this city ever made and the only one addressed to the sky. The Studebaker history in this record carries the ground's whole succession, including the grove's later life inside Bendix Woods County Park.

The boundary, printed plainly: The proving ground is Studebaker's, and South Bend's by the company's name — but it stands in the county near New Carlisle, not in the city, and this section prints it where it stands. It belongs in a South Bend famous-locations record the way the Dome does, with the geography stated and not argued: the fame names the company, and the company named this city.

Cross-reference: Studebaker (stu-proving-ground) owns the ground whole — the 1926 opening, the tree sign, the wartime testing, the Bendix–Bosch–Navistar succession. This entry carries the fame frame only.

Sources

1. The Studebaker history in this record — the 1926 opening as the first controlled proving ground of an American automaker; the 840 acres near New Carlisle; the 1937 planting of 5,000 pines spelling the company's name, legible in satellite photographs; the Army Ordnance testing of 1943–45; the succession to Bendix, Bosch and Navistar.