Studebaker in South Bend: The Wagon Shop That Became a Car Company

Studebaker · The Wagon Shop That Became a Car Company

Studebaker is the axis of South Bend's history. A two-man blacksmith shop opened at Michigan and Jefferson streets on 16 February 1852, with $68 of capital, became within one generation the largest builder of horse-drawn vehicles in the world and within two the fourth-largest automobile company in America. The firm supplied wagons to the Union Army, to the British, French, and Russian armies of the First World War, and trucks, aircraft engines, and tracked carriers to the second; it survived a receivership in 1933 that killed its president and came out of it under the two managers, Paul G. Hoffman and Harold S. Vance, who ran it for the next two decades; it made its name in design, through the Loewy studio's Champion, the coming-or-going Starlight coupe of 1947, the Bourke-drawn coupes of 1953, and the Avanti of 1962, the last of them designed in forty days in a rented house in Palm Springs. On 9 December 1963 the board voted to end automobile production in South Bend, and on 20 December the last car came off the main line. The pension plan's termination the following year became the most cited pension failure in America and part of the road to federal pension law. Production wound down at Hamilton, Ontario, until March 1966; the name outlived the cars by a year as a corporation and by decades in the Avanti's afterlife. What follows is the whole arc at the size the record carries: the wagon century, the borrowed automobiles and the corporation, the crisis and the design era, the war work, the merger and the long decline, the closing told from the documents, and what became of the works themselves.