The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (Vintage) (81 page)

In 1928, Samuel Crowther published an article in the
Ladies' Home Journal
that informed readers about his patron's newest project. “Henry Ford's Village of Yesterday,” as the writer termed it, would be constructed in Dearborn but, unlike other real-estate developments springing up around the nation's cities, this one had no lots for sale. In Crowther's words, it would be a “village of the yesterdays showing every period of American history.” It would be “an animated textbook” of the nation's experience, mixing a variety of productive activities from earlier periods, because, “while antiquarians may make period divisions, real life does not.” It would display houses from various regions of the country, and men and women in period clothing who would use traditional modes of transportation, teach old methods of making daily products, and demonstrate various activities that defined daily life in the past. Ford, in Crowther's words, was creating “a living, working institution because he does not like 'dead' museums.”
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Thus Ford planned a complement to his museum that would bring these items to life by re-creating for visitors the real, lived conditions of the American past. In many ways, Ford's historical village was a logical extension of his quest to present history in terms of the actual experience of ordinary men and women rather than the great-events approach of most textbooks. At the same time, it reflected Ford's keen sense of America's developing commercial culture of leisure and tourism. As Crowther noted, the village would support itself by charging an admission fee and selling articles that were made on the premises. With typical Fordian ambiguity, this idealized village would recapture the past and then market the result to vacationing consumers using the machinery of modern publicity.
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This idea probably stemmed from Ford's experience in rebuilding old structures such as his family homestead and the Wayside Inn. Having become addicted to bringing old buildings back to life, and inspired by the goal of educating the public about the real nature of the American past,
Ford sought to gather a group of houses and inns and sawmills and animate them. He chose Edward J. Cutler as manager for this historical reconstruction. A trained artist, Cutler had worked in the glass and drafting departments at Ford Motor Company since 1915, and Henry had tapped him to draft plans for a windmill replica to be placed on the family homestead. When Ford and Cutler picked out the Dearborn site for the museum in late 1926, they included enough land to house the village, approximately 245 acres in all. Over the next two years, Cutler drew up sketches of the project, laying out streets and placing buildings, and consulted regularly with his boss. He hit it off with Ford, in part because he understood the older man's aversion to long, written explanations. “Instead of writing things out, I would sit down with him on the ground and draw a sketch in the sand of what I was trying to do,” Cutler noted. As with the museum, Ford pored over all plans and retained final authority for all decisions about the village.
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As it took shape, the general plan for Greenfield Village, which Ford named after the old township in which Clara had grown up, called for an idealized town rooted in no single region or culture. Two focal points defined its structure. First, the main street featured a string of shops and stores offering commercial services and commodities from the past. Second, a village green, anchored by a church at one end and a town hall at the other, provided a spacious civic space, emphasizing the communal aspect of traditional towns. Other residential, commercial, manufacturing, and agricultural buildings clustered around these central features. As did his antique-hunters, Ford's agents around the United States looked for historical structures that might fit into this master plan. By March 1928, a number of buildings had been purchased, dismantled, and sent to the Dearborn site to be reassembled. By the late 1930s, these historical structures numbered almost a hundred.
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The village's buildings fell into four categories.

First, Ford selected structures that illustrated aspects of daily life in the past. These were buildings used for residence, commerce, transportation, and a wide variety of productive endeavors. By the early 1930s, this group included the Clinton Inn, Waterford Country Store, Addison Ford Barn, Deluge Fire House, Loranger Grist Mill, Phoenixville Post Office, Smith's Creek Train Station, Village Blacksmith Shop, Sims Machine Shop, Tintype Studio, Hanks Silk Mill, Cooper Shop, Tripp Sawmill, Susquehanna Plantation House, Grimm Jewelry Store, Richart Carriage Shop, several slave cabins, and a nineteenth-century steamboat, the
Suwanee.
Greenfield Village also housed a number of windmills, covered bridges, and machine sheds.

Second, Ford gathered buildings associated with famous figures in America's past. These included Edison's Menlo Park laboratory; the Logan County Court House, where young Abraham Lincoln had argued several cases; the Stephen Foster House; McGuffey House; Noah Webster House; Luther Burbank Birthplace; and Wright Brothers Bicycle Shop. Significantly, this group of historical personalities included no politicians except Lincoln. Instead, Ford's choices reflected his admiration for practical achievements in industry, education, transportation, and science.

Third, since a town hall and church could not be found in original form, Ford ordered reproductions and had Cutler draw up plans. Working in the Greek Revival style from the early nineteenth century, the architect designed the town hall as a modest clapboard structure featuring tall shuttered windows and fronted by a quartet of fluted columns. He used the eighteenth-century Georgian style to design a chapel based on a Universalist church in Bradford, Massachusetts. Elegant and stately, this redbrick structure featured a tall, multilayered wooden steeple rising into the sky above a pillared entryway. The Chapel of Martha-Mary, named after the mothers of Clara and Henry, included bricks and doors from the old Bryant family home, in which the Fords had been married.

Fourth, the village contained a number of buildings associated with Ford's own life. There was a replica of the Bagley Avenue shop where he had built his first horseless carriage. The Owl Night Lunch Wagon, which he had frequented while working for the Edison Illuminating Company, offered hamburgers and other light fare to visitors. A quarter-scale reproduction of Ford's Mack Avenue plant sat along one village street; the Scotch Settlement School, which he had attended as a youth in Dearborn, sat on another. Eventually, in 1944, three years before Ford's death, his restored childhood home was also moved to the village. Mingling his own exploits with those of Lincoln, Burbank, Edison, and Foster reflected Ford's finely honed sense of promotion and publicity.
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As part of the Greenfield Village project, Ford launched an old-fashioned school designed to educate selected Dearborn youth. This experiment in education adopted a “learn by doing” philosophy that featured hands-on lessons, field trips, work-study programs, and arts and crafts. It was convened in 1929 in the one-room Scotch Settlement School with thirty-two students. As the school grew in size over the next few years, its classes met in other historic buildings; it moved into a new education-and-recreation structure in 1937. The Greenfield Village school taught children from kindergarten through high school, with some advanced technical training offered to high-school graduates. Emphasizing practical skills,
Ford's academy attempted to ease the transition from school to working in the real world.
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As with the museum, Ford viewed Greenfield Village in educational terms. “I deeply admire the men who founded this country, and I think we ought to know more about them and how they lived and the force and courage they had,” he wrote in 1926. “The only way to show how our forefathers lived, and to bring to mind what kind of people they were, is to reconstruct, as nearly as possible, the exact conditions under which they lived.” By faithfully reconstructing the real circumstances in which they had lived, Greenfield Village aimed to present “a history that is intimate and alive, instead of something in a book,” Ford explained in 1929.
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Also like the museum, Greenfield Village displayed the personal imprint of Henry Ford on nearly every square foot within its boundaries. Although consulting with Cutler and others, he had the final say on the location of all buildings and exhibits in this outdoor site. The village fascinated him, and by the early 1930s, Ford was spending even more time there than at the museum. He loved its outdoor, real-life atmosphere and usually engaged in three favorite activities when there: tinkering with machinery and tools scattered about in various buildings, overseeing and inspecting construction projects, and visiting with schoolchildren.
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Ford found the village a haven from the burden of the Ford Motor Company. “I believe the pressures of Mr. Ford's work were relieved by the work in Greenfield Village,” Cutler noted. “Several times he would make a crack, ‘Well, I guess I'll have to leave you now, and go and make some more money for us to spend down there.’ ” For many years, Ford refused to let Cutler have a telephone in the village. When the manager protested that important communications from the Rouge would be needed, Ford replied, “Oh, forget that stuff. I came down here to get away from that gang.” As Fred Black noticed, his boss headed to Greenfield Village “as an antidote for any worry or trouble that the business had caused him … and in five minutes apparently forgot his business problems.”
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Ford sought to involve Clara in, and gain her approval of, the village. He would drive her around the site, pointing out various buildings, discussing plans for others, and asking her opinion. He often changed things if she disapproved. When the church was completed, for instance, the Detroit
News
published a story about the Mary-Martha Chapel, with the name of Henry's mother going first. But Clara sent word that
her
mother's name was to go first, and the title was changed officially. Another time, Henry, a notorious teetotaler, ordered antique liquor bottles removed from the barroom of the Clinton Inn. When Mrs. Ford came through, she noticed the change
and ordered the bottles restored. Henry returned several days later and angrily asked why his instructions had not been followed. The supervisor explained that it was Mrs. Ford's doing, and “that's all there was to it. So they've been there ever since.”
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Even though Ford genuinely loved Greenfield Village, he was not averse to making it economically self-sustaining or using it for publicity. As he once commented to Cutler, “It will never pay for itself. But you can't beat it as indirect advertising.” Indeed, the attraction fit smoothly within the new culture of leisure and tourism that Ford's automobiles had promoted in modern America. From the very beginning, operation of the village was aimed at accommodating visitors. Workmen constructed an entrance “gatehouse” for paying visitors, horse-drawn omnibuses were set to convey them about the streets, and student guides were hired to conduct tours. Employees dressed in period costumes demonstrated craft skills or impersonated historical figures to entice tourists. Sometimes these attempts at authenticity had unintended consequences. An actor who specialized in imitating Abraham Lincoln visited Ford and made an impression with his startling resemblance to the martyred President. Ford hired him to work in the Logan County Court House, where he would dispense “first-hand” information about Lincoln's life to delighted visitors. After a hard day's work, however, the actor fell asleep in the actual rocking chair in which Lincoln had been assassinated (Ford had purchased it during his antique-buying spree). The night watchman, unaware of Ford's hire, looked in on the building in the darkness, saw the tall, familiar figure slumped in the chair with his head lolling to one side, and fled in terror. Rushing into his supervisor's office, he choked out, “I've seen a ghost. Lincoln's up in the courthouse,” and slapped his badge down, resigning on the spot. A quick investigation clarified the situation and calmed the watchman's nerves, but he suffered many jokes about the ghost episode over the next several weeks.
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The public responded to Ford's re-creation of the common man and his past. In 1929, even before the village opened, about four hundred people a day were requesting tours; by 1933, it had grown to a thousand a day. Some were admitted, but most were turned away politely. In June 1933, after completion of the gatehouse, the public finally gained admittance, with adult tickets costing twenty-five cents and children's ten cents. In 1934, the first year it was calculated, paid attendance at Greenfield Village totaled 243,000. By 1940, it had increased to about 633,000. In 1960, yearly attendance would surpass one million visitors for the first time.
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Not surprisingly, many intellectuals viewed Ford's history exhibits with disdain. They criticized Greenfield Village and the Ford Museum for their sprawling, diffuse nature, lack of intellectual coherence, and unsophisticated
clientele. In 1937,
The New Republic
described the nearly half-million visitors to Dearborn as vacuous tourists who took in these attractions as a matter of obligation. They were “silent Americans of the type of Mr. Ford himself: those wind-burned, weather-beaten, middle-class and middle-aged people whom one sees in the trailer camps outside Sarasota in the winter. They descend upon the Ford exhibits … go in deep silence through the museum and village. When it is all over they come out, saying nothing, pack themselves into their cars again, and drive away.” But average Americans remained oblivious to the sneers of their intellectual betters. They flocked to Dearborn to inspect the old steam engines, reverently survey Edison's laboratory, imagine Lincoln arguing a case in the old courthouse, have their likeness inscribed on a tintype photograph, romp on the village green, and possibly learn a thing or two about their ancestors' lives.
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