Rebecca Marshall Farnbach
Special to the Valley News
Most people recognize the name Studebaker referring to the iconic bullet-nose car in the late 1940s. It is less known that a member of the Studebaker family factors into California history during the Gold Rush.
In Germany, the Studebakers’ name was Staudenbecker and they were known as skilled blacksmiths, metal workers and producers of fine cutlery. A large contingent of the family came to America in 1736 to escape persecution of their Baptist sect called “Dunkers.” The group shunned war and shared all material goods in common while living in Germany. In America, along with the change of name came a change to a more independent family unit.
Clement, one of the immigrants, built his first wagon in 1750. Otherwise, little is known about the family until his grandson John Studebaker married Rebecca Mohler and they produced five sons. John Studebaker had a hard time keeping food on his table and paying his rent. First, he tried farming in Maryland, but failed. Then, he bought a mill in Ohio. It also failed. Finally he opened a blacksmith shop. Ironically, this man who owed money to everyone in town put a sign over his smithy, “Owe no man anything, but love one another.”
As soon as his two oldest sons reached their later teenage years, John booted Clement and Henry out into the world to make their own way. They worked as day laborers in South Bend, Indiana with the dream of saving enough money to start a wagon shop. In 1852, they started making wagons and supplemented their income with money from Clement’s teaching job.
A few months after they started building wagons, the third eldest son, John Mohler Studebaker, called JM., arrived in South Bend. Since the business wouldn’t support even two of them, JM had to find other work. When he heard about a wagon train that needed another wagon to go to the California gold fields, JM formed a plan. The three brothers built the wagon in exchange for JM’s passage to California. Soon he was on his way.
The first thing that went wrong happened in Council Bluffs, Iowa. While his wagon trail waited for other families to join them, some men invited JM to play cards. “Why go to California when you can win all the gold you want right here?”
After watching a traveler easily win several games, JM hurried behind the building to slice open his belt to get to the $65 sewn inside. He wanted to win big before his opponents ran out of cash. Instead, when JM returned the card players took him for all but fifty cents.
It took the train five months to get to California because of skirmishes with Indians in Utah and the wagonmaster dying in Nevada from a scorpion bite.
When JM arrived in Hangman, California, now known as Placerville, his dream of amassing a fortune in gold was quickly dashed. Other opportunists had already staked the most promising claims. With a growling stomach, the young man applied for a carpenter job advertised by a blacksmith named John Hinds.
Hinds told JM if he couldn’t mine gold, he could mine the miners. Explaining, Hinds told him there were a number of mining commodities in short supply, which could be sold at a high cost. Hinds asked if JM had ever made a wheelbarrow. JM nodded his head, even though he had never made one before. He later admitted the first one he made in Placerville was wobbly and the second was better, but by the time he completed the third, he was proud of the way it stood on its own. Soon “Wheelbarrow Johnny” could barely keep up with the demand for his wheelbarrows. When a good mine produced only six dollars of gold a day, JM received $10 for each wheelbarrow he crafted.
JM worked hard producing wheelbarrows and other mining equipment, and he watched his savings grow at Adams & Company Bank. When the bank started to fail, JM suspected the owners would take his savings and run. After working hard every day, JM.would watch the bank each night. His premonitions proved true. One evening the proprietors entered the bank and began to fill a wheelbarrow with gold. At gunpoint, JM demanded his share of money; everyone else lost all their money. By 1858, JM.had saved $8,000.
Meanwhile in Indiana, his brothers were offered a contract to make 100 Army wagons. This caused a moral dilemma but weighing their need for money against their anti-war convictions, the Studebakers decided to make the wagons. Then a problem developed. After making a few wagons, the Studebakers ran out of working capital and the government was withholding payment because of a fraud investigation with the contracting official.
JM saved the day when he returned to Indiana with $8,000 of savings. The pacifist Studebakers eventually made 750,00 wagons for wars between 1861 and 1918.
Jacob Studebaker, the youngest brother, opened a branch plant in St. Joseph, Missouri in the 1870s in the more peaceful enterprise of outfitting settlers traveling westward. A man named Charles Goodnight bought some of the wagons and made them into chuckwagons. The Studebakers made freight wagons, lightweight spring wagons, buggies, sleighs, hand carts, hearses and two-wheeled carts.
The Studebakers were the only horse drawn carriage makers to successfully go on to produce cars. In 1902 they sold their first electric car, and in 1904 they began gasoline car production.
When JM returned to Placerville in 1912 for an official homecoming, he said, “There are so many things that combine to make success in life. I probably would never have made my start had it not been for my various experiences in old Hangtown and on the frontier where lessons are burned into the hearts and minds of men in a way that they cannot forget. I have had but two rules. The first was to work hard, and the second was never to buy anything that I couldn’t afford.”
JM outlived each of his four brothers, and when he died, the wagons were no longer made.
Every year Hangtown remembers JM with a wheelbarrow race at the county fair. After running through a grueling course of muck, the winner gets a pound of gold.
One of the original wheelbarrows made by JM is on display in the El Dorado County Museum in Placerville, just down the street from the blacksmith shop where it was made.
We also have a Studebaker connection in Temecula. An old spring wagon was donated to the Vail Ranch Restoration Association several years ago. When the volunteers removed a wheel to grease the axle, they found imprinted on the axle “Studebaker.” No doubt it was made in South Bend, Indiana or St. Joseph, Missouri and came across the Great Plains with a family traveling dusty trails westward.
In the style of Charles Goodnight, the volunteers renovated the wagon into a chuckwagon like one that could have been used in the Temecula area. The chuckwagon is outfitted with pots and pans, jerky and beans and can be viewed at the Little Temecula History Center.
Rebecca is a member of the Temecula Valley Historical Society and is an author and coauthor of several history books about the Temecula area. The books are available for purchase at the Little Temecula History Center or online from booksellers and at www.temeculahistoricalsociety.org.
Visit Rebecca’s Amazon author page: www.amazon.com/-/e/B01JQZVO5E.
The Little Temecula History Center, the red barn at the corner of Redhawk Parkway and Temecula Parkway in Temecula is open on Sundays from noon to 5 p.m.
