Studebaker: The Company That Built a City and Destroyed It

This is the full history of Studebaker: a gold-rush wheelbarrow business, army wagons for the Union, carriages for four presidents, the only wagon maker to survive the arrival of the motor car, a company president who paid dividends out of capital and then took his own life, trucks the Red Army named after the company, the first genuinely new American car after the war, one of the most beautiful coupés ever built and the tooling mistake that wasted it, a merger that destroyed two companies instead of saving one, a compact car that bought four more years, 7,000 jobs ended in a single announcement, the last car built in March 1966, and a pension collapse that changed federal law for every working American. There is a carriage in a museum in South Bend, Indiana. Abraham Lincoln rode in it to Ford's Theatre on the night of 14 April 1865. It is almost always described as a Studebaker. It isn't one — and the company that owns it today has been gone for sixty years. What Studebaker actually was is stranger than the myth. It began in 1852 as a blacksmith's shop with two forges and sixty-eight dollars. It became the largest vehicle manufacturer on Earth before the automobile existed. It is the only horse-drawn wagon maker in the world that successfully became a car company. And in December 1963 it announced, three weeks before Christmas, that it was closing the plant that had built the city around it. Chapters: 00:00 The carriage that isn't a Studebaker 02:53 Sixty-eight dollars and two forges 05:05 The largest vehicle maker on Earth 07:37 The president who paid dividends out of capital 10:27 First by far with a post-war car 13:22 The town that was the company 15:35 The Lark, the Avanti, and the last good year 18:14 December 20:45 The law written out of the wreckage ABOUT THIS CHANNEL BrandTale Saga tells the full stories behind the world's car brands — the founders who bet everything, the factories that built them, and the decisions that saved or destroyed them. No sponsorships. No brand deals. Just research. #Studebaker #Packard #SouthBend #carhistory #businesshistory #documentary #brandhistory #americanhistory