Bodies for other men's electrics, then an electric of its own

1895 – 1911

The push from inside: The move to motor vehicles began in the family. In 1895 John M. Studebaker's son-in-law, Fred Fish — who had married Grace Studebaker in 1891 and would become company president — urged the development of "a practical horseless carriage." On Peter Studebaker's death in 1897 Fish became chairman of the executive committee, and the firm had an engineer at work on a motor vehicle.

The body trade first: Studebaker's first automobile work was coachbuilding for others: from 1897, in the Tribune's account of the company's earlier reporting, Studebaker made bodies for the New York Electric Vehicle Company. Its own vehicle followed the same logic. Judging battery power the safer course, the company put its own Studebaker Electric into production in 1902 — runabouts and commercial vehicles, built through 1911, when electric production was discontinued as the corporation formed. The wagon trade's distribution was the point of all of it: Studebaker's dealer and branch-house network, built to sell wagons in every county, was the channel through which the company would sell automobiles, its own or other men's.

The standing claim: The museum's standing statement about the transition is that Studebaker was the only wagon manufacturer to make the change to automobiles successfully — carried, in museum archivist Andrew Beckman's words, as the thing no other horse-drawn vehicle manufacturer was able to do. It is printed here as the museum's claim, which the survival record supports in the plain sense that no other American wagon house became a lasting automobile manufacturer.

Sources:

1. Standard encyclopedia history of Studebaker, citing Erskine (1918) and the marque literature — Fred Fish's 1895 advocacy, his 1897 chairmanship and the engineer set to work, and electric manufacture from 1902 with discontinuation in 1911.
2. South Bend Tribune (2026), from the company's earlier reporting — the body-building for the New York Electric Vehicle Company from 1897, and Beckman on the uniqueness of the wagon-to-automobile transition.