Friday, October 19, 2018

The Henry Ford - Village


This post includes highlights of our visit today to Greenfield Village at The Henry Ford. Please see this post for an introduction to The Henry Ford, and this post for highlights of our visit to the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation adjacent to Greenfield Village.

The photo above shows the Martha-Mary Chapel that Henry Ford constructed to honor his mother (Mary Litogot Ford) and his mother-in-law (Martha Bench Bryant). The photo below is from the front of the church, looking across the Garden of the Leavened Heart (created by Henry Ford's wife Clara Bryant Ford) and across the village green to the Town Hall:


Henry Ford attended a one-room schoolhouse known as the Scotch Settlement School from age 8 to 11. He had the original building moved piece by piece and reconstructed in Greenfield Village:


Ford moved many buildings to Greenfield Village. Every village needs a bicycle shop, and Henry Ford found one in Dayton, Ohio. The photo below shows the original Wright Brothers shop and the adjacent Wright family home:


Inside the bicycle shop were people in period dress who explained the building and the activities of the day, including (behind the retail shop) a machine shop and a wind tunnel for testing airfoils.

One of Henry Ford's heroes was Thomas Edison, and Ford had Edison's famous Menlo Park Laboratory Complex moved from New Jersey to Greenfield Village. This complex is where Edison and his researchers developed the phonograph, the incandescent light bulb, and many other innovative inventions. The photo below is inside Edison's main laboratory:


Greenfield Village is 250 acres and includes a working farm, the Firestone Farm. It is large. One can walk around the village or take a steam train:


We also rode through Greenfield Village in a 1926 Touring Edition Model T:



The only other time we have ridden in a Model T was on our wedding day in 1979:


This post includes only a small fraction of all that there is to see in Greenfield Village! You have to see it for yourself.

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