henry ford's greenfield village

Adjacent to the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan is expansive acreage where Henry Ford preserved history in another way. Having the foresight to identify those who represent the heartbeat of America... people who would eventually find a place on the pages of our history books, he set about to preserve their memory by relocating 83 homes and businesses to 80 acres that was named Greenfield Village. Although a part of me feels that the buildings would be more authentic had they not been uprooted from their birthplace, I know that it would be difficult to visit all of them if they were scattered in various locations across the country. Also, they would eventually have fallen in disrepair and many would have been demolished.

Left Photo - Built near Columbiana, Ohio in 1828, this brick farmhouse was the childhood home of tire maker Harvey Firestone. It is a working farm where sheep are sheared, pigs are butchered, eggs are gathered, and horses pull plows where crops are planted and harvested. At the farm, and throughout the Village, costumed interpreters complete daily and seasonal chores like washing and mending laundry, churning butter, making soap, canning garden produce, and making apple butter.

Right Photo - When he was a poet-in-residence at the University of Michigan, Robert Frost lived in this house that was built about 1835. It was moved from Ann Arbor, Michigan. When we stepped across the threshhold of the front door, Robert Frost's voice greeted us as he read his 1920 poem, "The Road Not Taken."

The Road Not Taken 

By Robert Frost 1874-1963

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

 

 

    Wilbur and Orville Wright funded their aviation experiments with income generated in their bicycle business. Parts used in the assembly of their planes were built in their shop. In 1936, Henry Ford moved the cycle shop and the Wright family home from Dayton, Ohio to a peaceful street in Greenfield Village where they sit side by side.

 

   Thomas Edison's Menlo Park Laboratory, the courthouse where Abrahan Lincoln practiced law, Noah Webster's New Haven, Connecticut home where he compiled the first American dictionary and wrote textbooks, and on and on it goes. So many lives. Gathered together in one place.