Studebaker built wagons for decades before it trusted the car
In 1937 Studebaker planted 5,000 pine trees on its Indiana test track so that pilots overhead could read the company name. By then the firm had spent most of a century making horse-drawn vehicles, and one of its founding brothers had doubted small farmers could ever afford to keep a car running.
Henry and Clement Studebaker opened a wagon business in South Bend in 1852, joined over time by three more brothers; John Mohler, the longest-lived, died in 1917. Their family traced its craft to Solingen in Germany and to an ancestor, Peter Studebaker, who reached Philadelphia in 1736 and was building wagons and forging steel in the colonies by 1740. The firm incorporated in 1868 and made buggies, carriages and harnesses as well as wagons.
Automobiles came slowly. The company chose battery power first, selling its own electric vehicles from 1902, and only began making gasoline cars in 1904 through a partnership with Garford of Elyria, Ohio. It reincorporated as the Studebaker Corporation under New Jersey law in February 1911, dropping electrics that year, with Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs arranging the money. After absorbing the Detroit works of E-M-F, it paid mechanics to call on unhappy owners and swap bad parts, chiefly failing rear axles, at a cost of $1 million. That episode pushed it toward tough designs such as the Big Six.
The horse trade faded fast. In the seven years before 1918 Studebaker sold 466,962 horse-drawn vehicles against 277,035 cars, yet its plants by then could turn out 100,000 cars a year. Albert Erskine, the president, had the last wagon gear removed in 1919, and trucks took the wagons' place. When World War I began, Britain cabled orders for 3,000 transport wagons and 60,000 artillery saddles, and France and Russia followed.
In 1926 Studebaker opened the first controlled outdoor proving ground run by an American carmaker, and its small Erskine Six, launched in Paris, sold 26,000 abroad. A 1954 merger with Packard went badly, the South Bend plant stopped building cars on December 20, 1963, and the final Studebaker left a line in Hamilton, Ontario, on March 17, 1966.
Source: Studebaker
