South Bend entrepreneur to rebuild Studebaker guardhouse alongside former Studebaker assembly plant

Photos courtesy Studebaker Museum.

Dismantled and stuffed away with no discernible caretaker, a relic of Studebaker and South Bend history will rise again when the team redeveloping a former Studebaker assembly plant will rebuild the company’s former guardhouse.

Once positioned at the main gate of the Studebaker factory on Sample Street, the guardhouse, built in 1928, came down with the factory in 2008 to make way for South Bend’s Ignition Park technology hub. However, while the city demolished the factory, it carefully disassembled the 122-square-foot brick guardhouse and placed the remains in the former Studebaker assembly plant known as Building 84, still standing a couple of blocks north.

With other plans for the guardhouse dematerializing since then, however, the city decided earlier this month to give the guardhouse materials – 3,863 bricks, 16-foot iron gates, four limestone column caps, and boxes upon boxes of terra cotta roof tiles – to Kevin Smith, the local developer renovating Building 84 into a technology center.

“Everybody praises the Studebaker brothers and being inventive and all the rest, the guardhouse to me, reflects—it’s a tribute to every worker that actually built the cars, Studebaker did not build cars, people built cars,” Smith told television station WNDU.

According to the South Bend Tribune, city officials – prodded by Studebaker collector Tim Janowiak – had intended to reconstruct the guardhouse at the entrance to Ignition Park, not far from where it originally stood. But with concerns about who would maintain it at that location, the city’s redevelopment commission instead decided to transfer the materials to RDistrictOne LLC, a partnership that includes Smith.

In addition to numerous photos of the guardhouse – the most recognizable of which shows it on December 9, 1963, the day Studebaker announced it would move all automotive production to its Hamilton, Ontario, plant – the contractor hired to disassemble the guardhouse also took detailed measurements and made hand drawings of the structure.

Chris Dressel, a planner with the city, said the rebuilt guardhouse will have no dedicated use “but the value of having it there is it’s visible and accessible.”

Smith’s redevelopment of Building 84 – a project that also includes redevelopment of the adjacent buildings 112 and 113 – kicked off in 2015 and is expected to last 10 years and cost as much as $146 million.