LOUDONVILLE — Loudonville has a surprising link to famed luxury car brand Cord and Duesenberg.
The Cord was hand-built in Connersville, Indiana, between 1929 and 1937. The brand was a subdivision of the Auburn Automobile Company, which also produced Duesenbergs.
The Connersville plant, known as “Auburn Central,” employed highly-skilled metal workers to fabricate and assemble the high-end automobiles. However, in 1937 the plant went on strike and Auburn Automobile failed to reach an agreement with their workers.
The strike, coupled with dwindling sales during the Great Depression, forced Auburn management to close the Connersville plant and cease production of Cords.
The Flxible Company, in Loudonville, had growing orders for their new Flxible Clipper bus, but their primary income during the Depression came from their “professional car” line of ambulances and funeral cars. The cars were built on Buick chassis, and the chassis needed to be “stretched” to accommodate the necessary length of the professional cars.
Seeing a need for more skilled labor, Flxible sought out and hired a number of the now-unemployed craftsman from Connersville. By 1940, approximately 30 families from Connersville had migrated to Loudonville and took up work at Flxible — and a handful of those families still reside in the area today.
More information on the Cleo Redd Fisher Museum can be found at this link.
