The Proving Ground: from the tree sign to Navistar

1926 – today

Studebaker's ground: The proving ground Studebaker opened in 1926 — the first controlled outdoor proving ground of an American automobile manufacturer — lay on some 840 acres of rolling farmland near New Carlisle, about twelve miles west of South Bend, centered on a three-mile paved oval. In 1937 the company planted 5,000 pine trees on the property in a pattern spelling STUDEBAKER from the air; the grove still stands and is legible in satellite photographs. The Army Ordnance Department borrowed the ground from March 1943 to June 1945 to test its trucks and armored vehicles. At a remote wooded corner inside the oval, the company discarded its worn prototypes — the "Studebaker graveyard" of marque folklore, confirmed when the remains of many prototype cars and a few trucks were found there, most too far gone to move; the one 1947 Champion wood-sided station wagon prototype was rescued from the practice and is in the museum.

The succession: When South Bend closed in December 1963 the ground passed out of the company: Bendix leased it for three years and purchased it in 1966, in Navistar's corporate history of the site — the popular accounts date the Bendix sale to 1963 — and Bendix donated 195 acres of it to St. Joseph County, which became Bendix Woods County Park. In 1996 Robert Bosch GmbH acquired the proving ground with AlliedSignal's brake business and ran it as a test facility, most of its work latterly for outside customers. Navistar bought the ground from Bosch and took ownership on 1 April 2015 — its own site history dates the purchase to 2014, the announcement and opening to May 2015 — and operates it as the Navistar Proving Grounds: 668 acres in the company's announcements, 675 in its own facility materials, the three-mile oval and the test courses in current use for trucks, buses, and military vehicles. It is the one Studebaker works that has never stopped doing the work it was built for.

Sources:

1. Fleet Owner and Heavy Duty Trucking (May 2015), from Navistar's announcements — the purchase from Bosch, ownership from 1 April 2015, the 668-acre site and three-mile oval, and the ground's 1926 Studebaker origin; Navistar Proving Grounds facility history — the Bendix three-year lease and 1966 purchase, the 1996 Bosch acquisition, the 2014 purchase date in the company's own account, and the 675-acre figure in its materials.
2. Bendix Woods County Park (St. Joseph County Parks) — the 840 acres purchased in 1926, the first automobile proving ground in America, Bendix's donation of 195 acres for the park, and the Bosch–Navistar succession.
3. Standard encyclopedia history of Studebaker — the 1937 planting of the 5,000 pines and the tree sign's survival, the Bendix (1966) and Bosch (1996) acquisitions in the encyclopedia's dating, the prototype graveyard and its discovery, and the rescued 1947 Champion wagon prototype.