Just A Car Guy: The Studebaker Electric Fountain, a city landmark more than a century ago, is being restored and relocated

Sunday, November 18, 2018

The Studebaker Electric Fountain, a city landmark more than a century ago, is being restored and relocated

The elaborate fountain illuminated by colored electric lights was was a gift to the city by John M. Studebaker, co-founder and president of the Studebaker wagon, carriage and automobile company. It was unveiled in 1906 in Howard Park before a crowd of thousands of people.

The fountain stood in a large basin made of molded concrete. In the basin were figures of eight turtles and four cherubs riding dolphins, each spurting streams of water, below were figures of boys and swans. The crowning figure was a woman holding a small vase from which water spurted, and the middle section showed classical female figures. The fountain originally stood about 28 feet high, with the bottom concrete basin about 34 feet in diameter.

It was expected to stand for generations, but it lasted only 35 years. In 1941, the fountain was crumbling and the city parks department dismantled it, and for decades nobody knew for sure what had happened to it. Rumors circulated: it had been scrapped for metal during World War II, it was stored in an abandoned factory, it had been broken up and sold.

The fountain that had went missing for 68 years?

Jesse Seiler, of Granger, said family lore was that his grandparents, came into possession of the top two thirds of the Studebaker Fountain during the 1940s.

By the 1950s, his grandfather reassembled the fountain on the grounds of his miniature golf and driving range business which were out in the country, and his grandparents set up the fountain as a lawn ornament on the property.

In about 1960, Seiler's parents bought a new family home and moved the fountain to the home's backyard, which overlooks the St. Joseph River and it stayed there until 2009.

Seiler said he remembers his father saying that one of the missing cherubs was at a residence on Jefferson Boulevard in South Bend, being used as a lawn ornament.

When his parents died and the family house was to be sold, Seiler and his siblings didn't know what to do with fountain. He said he got an appraiser's estimate, which didn't value the fountain very highly, so they contacted the Center for History and donated it in 2009.

McKay Lodge Conservation Laboratory of Oberlin, Ohio, will restore the remaining original pieces. Robinson Iron Corporation (Alabama) will recast missing pieces using J.L. Mott’s original molds. Georgia Fountain Company will light fountain with fiber optic “light bulbs” designed to duplicate the 1906 lighting scheme.

The city expects to install the fountain in Leeper Park in 2019.