THE STUDEBAKER AUTOMOBILE--

and it's birth in Ashland County, more or less

Square dancing friend and professional appraiser from Ashland County, Russ Matz, recently pointed out a small stone memorial with a brass marker along US 250 about a mile east of I-71 and explained it was a tribute to the Studebaker automobile manufacturing family.

He went on to regale us with local stories about Studebaker testing an early engine in one of their prototypes which achieved a speed of 100 mph on a hill leading up to the site of the marker.   That engine was said to be from a shop at their nearby homesite.

Local anecdote, he said, also has it the memorial site is the smallest state park in Ohio.

Studebaker was a prominent auto manufacturer through the 1940s and ‘50s but ceased production with their last auto being built March 16, 1966 in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.  In fact, their history goes back into the 1800s where they built wagons for the country’s migration westward.

Matz’s enthusiastic description aroused our curiosity, then, the very next day on a trip to Newark, Sue and I noticed a Studebaker automobile on a classic car lot in Vanatta, south of Utica—where we stopped to do the attached photos.

It also turns out Sue has childhood memories of hauling her family’s derelict Studebaker to a local junk yard while I also remember fondly a neighboring family and their always new and shiny Studebakers during my high school days.

With those events and our combined memories, pursuit of this story was launched.

It quickly turned out there appears to be more legend than fact surrounding the Ashland area memorial.

No history of the Studebaker car company that I reviewed even mentioned Ashland as part of their automobile’s development or production past.

There is no Ohio Historical Marker commemorating the site.

There is no mention of this site being an Ohio State Park on the Ohio Department of Natural Resources web page.

We did find John Studebaker moved to Ashland County with his family from near Gettysburg in 1835 and built a home at the site of the memorial.  The family left there in 1850 and three of his sons wound up in northern Indiana where they started a blacksmith shop.

They were highly successful in selling wagons to the army during the Civil War and their business exploits grew into the Studebaker automobile company.

So, they were gone from Ashland County for some 50 years before the “horseless carriage” came into existence which pretty much eliminates the possibility of automobile engines being tested on a hill leading to their Ashland home.

Regarding the property on which the memorial is located we found a 15 by 20 foot piece of property from the Studebaker homestead was deeded to the Studebaker auto company in 1926 for placement of the monument that is there today.

When the Studebaker company failed that tiny parcel of land was then deeded in 1966 to the Ashland County Historical Society which pretty much trumps the locally popular legend of the site being the state’s smallest park.

The question of the memorial site being too close to the highway was resolved--in the site's favor--when Ashland ODOT's public information officer Christine Myers joined us in our research.

We revealed our findings to Russ and he smiled, knowingly.  With a salute to his sense of humor I left that meeting wishing the local legends were true.

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The car in the above photos is a 1962 Studebaker Hawk, Gran-Turismo.  It had an asking price of $7,900.  The light green car in the left rear of the lead photo is a very un-adorned Studebaker Lark.  Can you find lady friend Sue in any of the photos?  Fogeyisms tips our hat to ODOT's Christine Myers, folks at the Ashland Library research desk and the Ashland County Historical Society for their courteous and professional assistance on this story.