Carriage was founded in 1968 by Wilbur Witmer, Ray Stutzman, John Kurtz and C.T. (Clarence) Yoder. By 1972 Yoder and Witmer had bought out their partners and assumed ownership of the company. In 1998, Carriage was purchased by Glenn Cushman. For 42 years, we have been located in Millersburg, Indiana on a 72-acre campus that contains nearly 25 buildings of various capacities, nearly all of which are still used in some fashion to build our Luxury fifth wheels. Carriage’s first products were two lines of travel trailers, named the Carriage and the Rolls International. Fifth wheels hadn’t been invented yet, but even early on anything that had Carriage’s name on it was considered well built and reliable. Over the years we have also built conversion vans (for almost 20 years), Class C motorhomes (3 years), and even a few custom park models for Anheuser-Busch. We built our last travel trailer in the 2005 model year and have focused strictly on our four lines of high-end fifth wheels ever since. Another fundamental belief over the past 40 years is to build as much as possible ourselves. All other RV manufacturers in the industry are not truly builders. They are assemblers. They purchase part A from one vendor, part B from another and part C from a third then assemble the pieces to make a vehicle. The problem is two fold: 1) if the part is bad, who will stand behind it? The assembler or the original OEM? 2) As these different parts were built by different companies, they were not designed together. What does this all mean to you and the customers? We have a history, system and philosophy of building the best vehicles in the world. Apparently, the world agrees with us, as we’ve won the most quality awards—voted on by dealers and customers—in towables.
