The wagon works burned, twice · and the city watched it rebuild bigger

JUNE 1872 AND 24 AUGUST 1874

Fire was the factory city's recurring catastrophe, and its defining fire story is a story of rebuilding: In June 1872, twenty years after the Studebaker brothers opened their blacksmith shop, fire gutted the works. The company's own history, written by Albert Russel Erskine in 1918, puts the loss at nearly $100,000; the 1875 illustrated atlas of the county puts the combined losses of 1872 and what followed at some $450,000. J. M. Studebaker's obituary in the South Bend News-Times of 17 March 1917 gives the 1872 loss as $80,000 and places that fire in the frame factory north of the Lake Shore railroad. The figures are printed as their sources give them; the fact underneath them is single — the fire nearly ended the company, and did not.

The second fire was the greater: On 24 August 1874 the great wagon works burned again, and this time the loss ran to about $350,000, with only about a third of it insured — the Smithsonian's timeline of the company says the fire destroyed two-thirds of the factory. The rebuilding began, in the atlas's account, before the fire was out, and the larger works that replaced it — five hundred feet of frontage on Lafayette Street — were completed before winter. In the four months after the fire, the half-ruined works still turned out over 2,500 vehicles. A third big fire followed in 1885, which the Smithsonian's timeline records without a settled loss figure in the record this build could reach; it is printed here at that size. The pattern the fires set is the point of the entry: three times in thirteen years the works burned, and each time the brothers rebuilt on the same ground, larger. The wagon century that followed — and the automobile century after it — stood on ground that had already been tested by the worst thing the nineteenth-century city could do to a factory.

Sources:

1. Albert Russel Erskine, History of the Studebaker Corporation (1918) — the June 1872 fire and its loss of nearly $100,000; the fire of 24 August 1874, the loss of about $350,000, the rebuilding and the enlarged works.
2. Illustrated Atlas of St. Joseph County (1875) — the combined 1872 and 1874 losses of some $450,000, the fraction insured, the rebuilding begun before the fire was out, the five hundred feet of Lafayette Street frontage finished before winter, and the 2,500 vehicles made in the four months after.
3. Smithsonian Institution, Studebaker timeline — 1872, "a fire almost destroys the company"; 1874, "a second huge fire destroys two-thirds of the factory"; 1885, another big fire.
4. South Bend News-Times, 17 March 1917 (via Hoosier State Chronicles) — the obituary of J. M. Studebaker, giving the 1872 loss as $80,000 and the frame factory's position north of the Lake Shore.