Flat Rock: Ford's Lamp Town on the Huron River
Near Detroit, Michigan
A French priest noticed a striking limestone outcropping on the Huron River here in seventeen ninety-eight and wrote it down as Grosse Roche, the Big Rock. American settlers arrived in the early eighteen hundreds, saw the same flat stone shelf, and called the place Flat Rock. What made it a real town was Henry Ford.
In the mid nineteen twenties, Ford opened a lamp factory here powered by hydroelectric turbines on the Huron River, part of his Village Industries program, a string of small-scale plants he built in southeast Michigan towns to keep rural workers employed and supply his massive River Rouge complex downriver. The factory stayed in production for decades. Today Flat Rock is home to a Ford assembly plant that has made vehicles including the Mustang, keeping the town's automotive identity intact about a century after Henry Ford first chose this bend in the river.
