The company's own museum — Studebaker collects itself

The collection begun in the nineteenth century

The collector brothers: The Studebaker National Museum began as the Studebaker company's own act of memory. The brothers who built the firm saved everything — the Conestoga wagon that had brought the family west among it — and Clement Studebaker, late in the nineteenth century, began deliberately purchasing historic horse-drawn carriages for the company. As early as 1910, in one account, a museum of historic carriages and cars was part of the Studebaker corporate headquarters; the company's own dating carries the display room at its administration building to 1916. The two datings are printed as they stand in the record; the thing they date is not in dispute.

The treasures: What the company gathered became, in the museum's own accounting, a set of seven objects designated National Treasures. Among them: the carriage the Marquis de Lafayette used on his farewell tour of the United States in 1824–25, and the barouche Abraham Lincoln rode to Ford's Theatre on the night of his assassination, 14 April 1865. The presidential carriages of Ulysses S. Grant, Benjamin Harrison and William McKinley stand with Lincoln's — the collection the museum and the city's visitor bureau describe as the world's largest collection of United States presidential carriages, a superlative printed here as their claim, which the four carriages in one room go far to support. The company's history — the wagons, the cars, the closing — is the Studebaker leg's record; what follows here is the collection's life after the company ended.

Sources:

1. Classic Cars Journal, "Studebaker National Museum" (2014), and the Gentleman Racer and Mac's Motor City Garage accounts — Clement Studebaker's carriage purchases in the late nineteenth century, the museum at corporate headquarters by 1910, and the family Conestoga.
2. Studebaker National Museum, as carried in its published accounts and in Expedia's museum profile from the museum's text — the 1916 display room at the administration building.
3. Studebaker National Museum, as carried by Military Trader — the seven objects designated National Treasures, including Lincoln's Ford's Theatre carriage and Lafayette's farewell-tour carriage.
4. Midwest Guest, "Visiting Studebaker National Museum" (2014), and Visit South Bend Mishawaka — the carriages of Lafayette and of Presidents Grant, Benjamin Harrison, Lincoln and McKinley, and the "world's largest collection of U.S. presidential carriages" as the museum's stated standing.
5. The Studebaker record of this history — the 14 April 1865 carriage as the museum states it, and the company's course to 1966.