Trivia #03-Henry and Clem Studebaker

Long before Detroit’s muscle car wars, two Indiana blacksmiths built a company that would eventually produce one of the era’s most overlooked performance machines. The Studebaker brothers started with horseshoes, survived a Civil War wagon contract, and only reluctantly entered the automobile business decades later. Their company’s final act included a supercharged V8 capable of matching contemporaries from Detroit’s Big Three. It simply ran out of time to prove it.

Two blacksmiths with sixty-eight dollars between them had no idea they were laying the foundation for a company that would eventually build one of the most underrated supercharged performance cars of the 1960s. Henry and Clem Studebaker’s little wagon shop in South Bend, Indiana started out making horseshoes and hardware, not horsepower. It would take another half-century, a Civil War government contract, and a reluctant pivot into the automobile business before the Studebaker name meant anything to gearheads. By the time it finally did, the company was already living on borrowed time. So how did a 19th-century wagon works end up producing one of Detroit’s forgotten performance icons?

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From Horseshoes to a Government Contract

Henry and Clem opened their blacksmith shop in February 1852, making metal parts for freight wagons before expanding into full wagons and, by 1857, carriages. A contract to build wagons for the U.S. government forced them to develop a faster timber-aging process just to keep up with demand. Henry left the business in 1858 — as a Dunkard and committed pacifist, he reportedly had little taste for supplying war materials — and younger brother John Mohler Studebaker bought in. By 1868, annual sales topped $350,000 and the Studebaker Brothers Manufacturing Company was formally born.

The Reluctant Leap Into Automobiles

Studebaker didn’t rush into cars. The company built its first electric vehicle in 1902 and didn’t offer a gasoline-powered model until 1904, running wagon and automobile production side by side for years while the market sorted itself out. That caution paid off longer than most of its wagon-era competitors managed, carrying Studebaker through both World Wars as a major American manufacturer.

A Supercharged Swan Song

Studebaker’s final chapter included a genuine performance surprise: the 1963-64 Avanti and Super Lark, offered with the R-series 289-cubic-inch V8 in naturally aspirated R1 form (240 hp) or Paxton-supercharged R2 form (roughly 289-290 hp), plus a rare, bored-out 304.5-cubic-inch R3 variant that pushed past 335 horsepower for the handful of buyers who found one. It was a legitimate rival to anything Detroit’s Big Three were building at the time. The South Bend plant closed in December 1963, and Studebaker exited the auto business entirely by 1966 — just as its performance credentials were finally catching up to its history.

Wartime Wagons Turned Wartime Trucks

When World War I began, the same company that once built wagons for the U.S. Cavalry pivoted its factories toward military trucks and artillery wagons, work that kept South Bend’s assembly lines humming well before Detroit’s automakers fully retooled for war production. That pattern repeated itself a generation later: during World War II, Studebaker built the M29 Weasel, a tracked, amphibious cargo carrier designed to cross snow and mud that wheeled vehicles couldn’t touch, alongside thousands of 6×6 military trucks shipped to Allied forces overseas. The company that struggled to find its footing in passenger cars kept its factories, and its workforce, alive by building whatever the moment required.

Raymond Loewy Made Studebaker Look Like the Future

Studebaker’s postwar reputation for style traces back to one man: industrial designer Raymond Loewy, whose studio penned the 1947 Starlight coupe, a car so aerodynamically forward-looking that dealers famously joked customers couldn’t tell if it was coming or going. Loewy’s team followed it with the 1953 Starliner coupe, a low, wraparound-windshield design that influenced American car styling for the rest of the decade and is still regarded by design historians as one of the cleanest shapes Detroit ever produced. Loewy’s name would resurface one more time, on the car that closed out Studebaker’s story.

A Merger That Bought Borrowed Time

By 1954, Studebaker’s sales had slipped badly enough that the company merged with Packard, another storied independent automaker fighting the same battle against Ford, GM, and Chrysler’s economies of scale. The merger created the Studebaker-Packard Corporation, but it never solved the underlying problem: two smaller manufacturers combining rarely out-competes three giants with far deeper pockets. Packard’s own nameplate didn’t survive the decade, discontinued in 1958, leaving Studebaker to carry the combined company’s name into the 1960s largely on its own.

South Bend Closes, But the Line Didn’t Stop

When the South Bend, Indiana plant shut its doors in December 1963, Studebaker didn’t disappear overnight. Production shifted north to a smaller factory in Hamilton, Ontario, where the company kept building cars on a reduced scale for roughly two more years before finally exiting the automobile business entirely in 1966. It was a quiet, drawn-out ending for a company that had been building vehicles, first wagons, then cars, for well over a century.

The Avanti’s Second Life

The Avanti’s story didn’t end with Studebaker’s exit either. Two South Bend dealers bought the rights to the design and kept building the fiberglass-bodied coupe in small numbers under the Avanti Motor Corporation name well into the 1980s, a rare case of a discontinued car outliving the company that created it. That staying power says something about how far ahead of its time the Avanti’s Loewy-team styling and standard front disc brakes, unusual for any American car in 1963, really were.

Why the Big Three Never Worried About Studebaker

For all its engineering ambition, Studebaker never had the manufacturing scale to seriously threaten Ford, GM, or Chrysler on price. The company’s per-unit costs stayed stubbornly higher than its much larger competitors could manage, a structural disadvantage that no amount of styling innovation from Loewy’s studio could fully offset. That cost gap, more than any single bad model year, is the quiet reason independent automakers like Studebaker kept losing ground decade after decade even when their cars were genuinely competitive on paper.

What Collectors Look For Today

Studebaker collectors today tend to gravitate toward two very different eras of the same company: the pre-war and immediate postwar cars prized for their historical significance, and the 1963-64 Avanti and supercharged Larks prized for outright performance. That split reflects the brand’s own split personality, a century-old wagon maker that spent its final years building some of the most genuinely quick cars in America, right before closing its doors for good.

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