Wagons and plows: the founding shops

FEBRUARY 1852 — 1868

Two small shops opened within three years of each other made the city: In February 1852, at the corner of Michigan and Jefferson in the little county-seat town, the brothers Henry and Clement Studebaker — blacksmiths, the younger a wagonmaker — opened the H. & C. Studebaker blacksmith and wagon shop. Their younger brother John M. joined them in time. The shop's first large order, for Army wagons, came in 1857; through the Civil War the firm turned out thousands of hand-assembled wagons for the Union Army, and in 1868 the brothers completed the arc from shop to corporation as the Studebaker Brothers Manufacturing Company. The company's full history — the largest wagon works on earth, the carriage trade, the automobile — is told in the Studebaker section of this record; the Story of South Bend section marks only that it began here, in a blacksmith shop on the town's main corner, in the railroad's first year.

The plow works began with an even smaller sum. James Oliver, a Scottish immigrant who had worked in an iron foundry across the river in Mishawaka — that city's ground, and its story — came to South Bend in 1855 and bought a quarter interest in a small foundry here. The story told ever since prices the share at $88.96, the inventory value of his quarter, against the $100 he had in his pocket. In 1857 he patented the invention his name still carries: the chilled plowshare, cast by a process that left the share's face hard and glassy so the soil scoured off it clean in the sticky prairie ground where polished steel clogged — the plow that would open the wet black soils of the whole Midwest. On July 22, 1868 — the same year the Studebakers incorporated — his firm was incorporated as the South Bend Iron Works to make the Oliver Chilled Plow. Two immigrant-and-migrant workshops, a wagon and a plowshare: between them they would employ, at the peak, more people than lived in South Bend when they were founded.

Sources:

1. South Bend Tribune — the H. & C. Studebaker shop founded at Michigan and Jefferson in 1852; Hemmings — the firm's thousands of wagons for the Union Army and its 1868 incorporation.
2. City of South Bend reference history — the brothers' founding of February 1852 and the first large Army wagon order of 1857; the Studebaker Brothers Manufacturing Company's incorporation in 1868.
3. Oliver Tractor reference history (olivertractors.ca) — James Oliver's 1855 purchase of the quarter interest, the $88.96 inventory price, and the chilled plowshare patent of 1857; Oliver Corporation histories — the South Bend Iron Works incorporated July 22, 1868.
4. studebaker section, this record — the company in full.