Schnabel Company

Martin Schnabel was born in Austria in 1820 to a well established family of wagon and carriage builders. As a teenager he worked in the family workshops up until he emigrated to the United States in order to avoid compulsory military service in the Austrian military. Upon his arrival he went to stay with his uncle, who lived in Pittsburgh, and found him employment as a blacksmith in one of the cities wagon works.

By 1860 Martin had his own shop at the corner of Penn Avenue and Carson Street. The 1862 Pittsburgh City Directory lists his address as Penn at tollgate, which referred to the corner of Penn and Carson Streets where a toll gate had been operated for many years. A few years later Carson Street was renamed Twentieth Street.

In 1863 Schnabel and another Pittsburgh wagon-maker named Henry Mollman joined forces establishing a new wagon works at the northwest corner of Penn Avenue and Taylor Street in quarters rented from W.C. Denny. Schnabel & Mollman’s timely entrance into the wagon and coach business coincided with the outbreak of the Civil War. All of a sudden unlimited amounts of money were available for war-related expenditures, and the firm soon secured contracts with the US Government to supply the Army of the North with horse-drawn ambulances and limber, caisson and supply wagons. By 1867 Martin Schnabel had saved enough money to buy out Mollman, who relocated to the Lawrenceville section of Pittsburgh at the corner of Butler and Fiftieth Street. Schnabel’s son, Gustavus, had been working for his father since the end of the war, and when Martin Schnabel passed away unexpectedly in 1873, the 19-year-old was forced to take charge of the family’s business as the future of his three younger sisters depended on it.

In 1901 the company was renamed G.A. Schnabel & Sons, Carriage Builders. Schnabel continued building their successful line of horse-drawn wagons, heavy trucks, delivery wagons and carriages into the early twentieth century when production slowly shifted over to commercial bodies for horseless conveyances

In 1912 an advertisement was placed under the new classified heading of Automobile Body Builders, however the firm’s greatest success came in the commercial body field and from 1915 onwards, motor truck bodies became the firm’s sole product line.

A 1911 Fire destroyed most of the firm’s aging 3061 Penn Ave factory. The firm carried very little insurance at the time and the family was forced to use their personal savings in order to stay in business. It soon became obvious that if the firm were to survive the transition to automobile and truck body-building, a much large facility was required. Consequently the firm’s fire-damaged factory was abandoned and the firm moved to more spacious facilities at 2410 Penn Avenue, which was located between Twenty-fourth and Twenty-fifth Streets. After the move to 2410 Penn Avenue, the firm’s main customers became large retail fleets and public utilities for which they produced whatever type of body was needed. They entered the professional car field in 1912 offering bodies on their own assembled chassis notable for its Renault-style coal scuttle hood with its radiator placed behind the engine. They also built on White, Packard, and any other high quality chassis the customer might supply. Their distinctive wide-bodied barrel-bottomed funeral coaches and ambulances offered substantially more interior space than the competition and were good sellers in Ohio, Western New York and Pennsylvania.

Schnabel started a trend later popular in England of creating new bodies for existing used chassis. In Britain many Rolls-Royces started out life as passenger cars in the 1930s and ended up as hearses in the 1940s & 1950s. One disadvantage of building on existing chassis was that quite a few older chassis were too short for the coachwork, looking like they were about to fall off the back of the chassis.

By 1916, the budget-minded Schnable was producing a few brand new coaches on their own assembled chassis, but most of their simply styled bodies ended up on either used or low cost chassis such as Ford's Model T. Mainly a commercial body builder, Schnabel built few, if any, professional cars beyond the early twenties when they turned their attention to insulated and refrigerated truck bodies.

In 1915, all-weather tops were becoming popular and the Schnabel brothers offered custom built automobile tops for owners of touring cars, roadsters and phaetons. Although that business began to flounder with the availability of popular priced closed cars, their commercial body business continued to increase and by 1923 the once spacious 2410 Penn Avenue factory was seriously limiting their earning potential. As a direct consequence, the firm was reorganized and incorporated as the Schnabel Company Inc., and the company moved into a large industrial complex located at S. 10th and Muriel Streets that was shared with the Allegheny & South Side Railway Company, a division of the Oliver Iron & Steel Company, their new landlord.

In addition to buses, delivery vans, and utility vehicles Schnabel built refrigerated bodies for regional dairies, breweries and grocers extending their once local customer base into New York, Kentucky and Ohio.

In 1931 they built a 9-yard aluminum body for the D. Carapellucci, a local hauler for the Fire Safe Products Company. Built using a Mack AK chassis it was equipped with a St. Paul Model SUB Underbody Hydraulic Hoist. Extensive WPA truck body contracts helped the firm survive the Depression and by the late-thirties its successful line of ice cream and milk truck bodies were nationally distributed via truck equipment catalogues.

As with many regional commercial body builders, Schnabel built the occasional fire apparatus and rescue body. An open-topped fire brigade (crew) bus on a late thirties Diamond T chassis was built for the John A. Irwin Fire Company of Evans City, PA. Schnabel included an awning that could be erected over the open body if needed during inclement weather or hot sun.

Schnabel built a few woody wagons in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s and also built a one-off woody dog trailer to match a customer's 1942 Chrysler Town & Country wagon.

In the 1940’s and 1950’s, Schnabel was the Pittsburgh distributor of Superior School bus bodies, which were used extensively by the Pittsburgh City School District.

During the 1960s the firm moved to Nichol Avenue, in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania, a northwest suburb of Pittsburgh. The McKees Rocks plant was sold to the J. Murray Company Inc. sometime around 1970 and the firm withdrew from business.


Certificate: Capital Stock, unissued/uncanceled, early 1900’s

Printer: M. E. Cunningham Co., Pittsburgh

Dimensions: 8” (h) x 10 3/4” (w)

State: PA-Pennsylvania

Subject Matter: Auto Makers | Truck Makers | Unissued Pieces

Vignette Topic(s): Cars Featured | Tire Featured

Condition: No fold lines or cancels, and some toning from age.