The name written for airplanes

1937 · A HALF MILE OF PINES, READ FROM THE SKY

The sign: The largest piece of advertising South Bend ever made was addressed to the sky. On the proving ground Studebaker opened in 1926 near New Carlisle — the first controlled outdoor proving ground built by an American automobile manufacturer, some 840 acres with a three-mile oval — the company planted, in 1937, five thousand pine trees in the shape of the letters of its own name: STUDEBAKER, spelled in a living grove a half mile long, to be read from the air. The grove still stands, still legible in satellite photographs, and stands with the proving ground's clubhouse on the National Register of Historic Places. The county parks marker at the ground carries the register line, printed here as the marker's statement: "According to the 1987 Guinness Book of World Records, the Studebaker sign is the largest living advertisement in the world." The boundary is printed where the home sections print it: the ground is Studebaker's, and South Bend's by the company's name, but it stands in Olive Township in the county, near New Carlisle — not in the city — and this entry prints it where it stands.

Sources:

1. The Studebaker section of this history — the 1926 proving ground and the 1937 planting of 5,000 pine trees spelling the name from the air; the Trails section — the half-mile pine tree sign and the clubhouse on the National Register of Historic Places; the Famous Locations section — the ground's fame frame and its boundary; the St. Joseph County Parks marker at Bendix Woods County Park, "Rooted in Studebaker History" (erected by St. Joseph County Parks; transcribed in the Historical Marker Database) — the 1987 Guinness Book sentence, quoted as the marker gives it.