Trio of Hoosier auto museums team up for Indiana-built cars exhibit

Auburn Cord Duesenberg Automobile Museum. Photo by Carl Grant.

Of the 48 states outside of Michigan that at one point saw automobile production, perhaps none had developed its automotive industry quite as extensively as Indiana, a state that some believe could have eclipsed its neighbor to the north in building cars and trucks. To celebrate that industry as part of the state’s bicentennial, three Hoosier-state automobile museums have collaborated on a statewide exhibit of purely Indiana-built cars.

Some of Indiana’s earliest automobile history happens to coincide with some of America’s earliest automobile history. While the Massachusetts-based Duryea is generally acknowledged as the first American gasoline-powered automobile, John Lambert of Anderson had his rolling in 1891 and Elwood Haynes of Kokomo made plenty of his own claims to automotive pioneerhood. The following decade saw some of what would become Indiana’s best-known automakers – Studebaker, Cole, and Marmon among them – enter the field, with even more coming along in the Teens and Twenties.

In total, the Standard Catalog of American Cars lists more than 350 individual car makers from Indiana, but Dennis and Terri Horvath’s Indiana Cars: A History of the Automobile in Indiana, notes that more than 400 car-, truck-, and cyclecar-builders called the state home. As the Horvaths noted, Indiana had plenty of attributes that made it ideal for carbuilders: its supply of lumber and steel, its readily available waterpower, its proximity to major markets, and its existing industrial centers – Auburn, Indianapolis, Elkhart, Richmond, and South Bend – with plenty of trained labor.

“In light of history, it now seems possible that Indianapolis missed passing Detroit and becoming the world’s automotive center merely because it failed to advance the spark at the correct moment,” as the Horvaths quoted from Carl Glasscock’s Motor History of America. Indeed, they note that Indiana could have surpassed Michigan’s motoring prowess if Indiana-based automakers had better access to capital or if they had embraced the low-price, high-volume business model earlier.

1931 Duesenberg Model J Beverly Sedan. Photo courtesy the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Automobile Museum.

Instead, Indiana saw some of the nation’s – and the world’s – most luxurious and sporting carbuilders settle there: the Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg trio, Stutz, Marmon, ReVere, and the American Underslung. Though as it turned out, Studebaker, the longest-lasting Indiana-based car builder, survived as long as it did by turning to the low-price, high-volume business model.

With the statewide bicentennial celebrations taking place throughout 2016, three auto museums – the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Automobile Museum, the Kokomo Automotive Museum, and the Studebaker National Museum – will present Hoosier Made: World Driven, a three-part exhibit celebrating the prewar glory years of Indiana’s auto industry. The Studebaker National Museum will focus on the Brass Era of the first decade and a half of the twentieth century; the Kokomo Automotive Museum will focus on the Jazz Era of the late Teens and Twenties; and the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Automobile Museum will focus on the Classic Era of the Thirties.

The exhibits, an endorsed Legacy Project by the Indiana Bicentennial Commission, opened November 20 and will run through October 3, 2016. For more information, visit KokomoAutomotiveMuseum.org, AutomobileMuseum.org, or StudebakerMuseum.org.