Henry Ford's Argument With History
Near Detroit, Michigan
Henry Ford famously said that history is bunk. What he meant, it turns out, was that written history left out the people who actually built things. His answer was to build a museum that put objects at the center, the spinning wheel, the steam thresher, the assembly-line machine, the bus where Rosa Parks refused to move, the chair Abraham Lincoln was sitting in at Ford's Theatre.
Ford began collecting in earnest around nineteen o-six, not as a rich man's hobby but as a conviction. He believed the true story of America was in its tools and its workplaces, not in the texts of politicians. By the nineteen-teens his agents were acquiring anything connected to Thomas Edison, whose work Ford revered above nearly all others. He eventually saved Edison's Menlo Park laboratory building, had it recreated in Dearborn using original materials from New Jersey.
The result was Greenfield Village, about ninety acres of original structures relocated from across the country: the Wright Brothers' cycle shop from Dayton, Noah Webster's Connecticut home, a courthouse where Abraham Lincoln argued cases in Illinois. Ford dedicated the whole complex on October twenty-first, nineteen twenty-nine, the fiftieth anniversary of Edison's incandescent light bulb. Edison himself attended, elderly and frail, and reenacted the moment of discovery in his own reconstructed lab while President Herbert Hoover and Ford looked on.
The indoor museum that grew alongside the village became one of the largest history museums in the United States. It holds the presidential limousine from Dallas in nineteen sixty-three, the bus from Montgomery, a collection of American-made cars tracing a century of industrial design, and a working steam engine that visitors can watch run.
Ford called the whole enterprise the Edison Institute, a tribute to the man he most admired. Today it operates as The Henry Ford, pulling more than one and a half million visitors a year to Dearborn. Whether Ford reconciled his contempt for textbooks with the fact that he built one of the country's great history institutions is a question the place quietly invites you to sit with.
