The Piquette Plant: Where the Model T Was Born

In the Milwaukee Junction neighborhood of Detroit stands a three-story brick building that may be the most consequential factory in American history. This is the Ford Piquette Avenue Plant, and it is the room where the Model T was conceived.

Henry Ford's company built the plant in nineteen oh four, designed by the firm Field, Hinchman and Smith in the style of a New England textile mill, timber-framed, three stories, stretching more than four hundred feet. It even had one of the first automatic sprinkler systems in the nation, fed by a twenty-five-thousand-gallon rooftop tank.

The first cars built here were the Model C, the Model F, and the Model B. Then in late nineteen oh seven, Henry Ford commandeered a small room on the third floor and locked it. Inside, he and a handful of trusted engineers began secret experiments toward a car that would be simple enough for any farmer to maintain and cheap enough for working families to own. On September twenty-seventh, nineteen oh eight, the first Model T emerged from that secret room and onto the plant floor. Within a year, Ford was struggling to build them fast enough. The first fourteen thousand Model Ts in existence were assembled right here and shipped by rail across the country.

The Model T's success quickly outgrew Piquette. Ford moved production to the massive Highland Park plant in nineteen ten, and Piquette passed through several owners, including Studebaker and Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing. It sat abandoned for decades before preservationists stepped in. Designated a National Historic Landmark in two thousand six, it now operates as a museum. The locked room on the third floor has been restored, the workbench where the Model T was sketched out still in its place.