Greenfield Village Open-Air Museum

If you read the second chapter / blog of this Greenfield Village collection you will remember reading the following: The year was 1914, and Clara Ford, wife of Henry, watched children play one day as they made their way home from school. A childhood rhyme suddenly came to her, and she said it aloud: 'Hear the children gaily shout, "Half past four and school is out!" ' Henry and Clara both thought the rhyme came from one of the W illiam McGuffey Eclectic Readers, first published in 1836. After a futile search to find which Reader it came from, and through it all amassing a rather large and complete collection of the 145 different editions, he found he had a penchant for collecting. He already had a rather large collection of clocks and watches, which he loved to tinker with as a child. And, he had accumulated objects of his hero, Thomas Edison. So the McGuffey Readers were just another extension of what was quickly becoming his passion. It seemed that the original M...

Currier Shoe Shop (formerly known as Newton Shoe Shop): Originally from Newton, New Hampshire, this shoe shop, run by William Currier, dates back to the 1880's and represents one of the earlier smaller shoe factories where machinery was used. Mr. Currier, who worked at this building for more than 60 years, would hire neighbors to help run the steam-run machines that drove the stitching machine and buffer as well as do the hand work. During the 19th century there were around two thousand small shoe shop factories in America similar to this one. Because of their size, these shops were called "ten-footers" and were often located beside the shoemaker's home. The cobbler would work all the day and into the evening hours, using the smoky kerosene lantern for light. When this building was located in side of Greenfield Village, originally situated right next to the Cooper Shop (how wonderful that must have been!), it would show many of the objects used by Mr. Currier ...

The Printing Office: Built inside the Village in 1933, half of this building is a printing shop, and the other half is a tinsmith shop. In the print shop, a variety of presses are demonstrated, from early powered presses to a hand press. The presenter sets the type to show the patrons how printing was done in the days before automation, including the typesetting of the letters and woodcuts. Using the hand press, the visitor can see how the early papers were printed by hand. In our modern age of instant information via phone, home computer, radio, and other electronic sources band devices, many of the folks today - especially school age children - do not realize how important the occupation of printing was to the towns and villages of the 19th century, in many cases the only source of news of the outside world. The Tin Shop: The tinsmith made lanterns, candleholders, and household utensils from the 17th through the early 20th century. Called the poor man's silver, all that was neede...

In 1893, Henry Ford and wife Clara moved into a rented house at 58 Bagley Avenue. At that time, Ford was an engineer for the Edison Illuminating Company of Detroit. This replica of the Detroit Shed/workshop that was located in the backyard of the home where Ford built his first car in 1896 was constructed inside the Village in 1933, although, in many ways, it is not totally a replica. To get his Quadricycle out of the shed, Ford had to knock out the bricks around the doorway. Although the original shed was torn down some years after, Ford located the house in which the bricks and doors had been used. By building a new wall for the owners of the house, Ford was allowed to remove the old shed bricks and doors for his reconstruction. A replica of the Quadicycle sits inside the shed. The original 1st auto by Ford is inside of the Henry Ford Museum. .

When the grandfather of Thomas Edison led his family into Upper Canada in 1811, he settled in Vienna, Ontario, near the shore of Lake Erie. In 1816, their log cabin was replaced by this homestead, the first and for many years the only frame structure in that region. In this home, the father of the great inventor, Samuel, grew to manhood, and married Nancy Elliot, the village school teacher, in the Sunday parlor in 1828. When his arrest was sought because of his participation in the political rebellion of 1837, the house was ransacked by the military. By that time, Samuel Edison had fled to the United States. Young Tom had returned to his ancestral home over many summers and fondly recalled the large, simple, farm-type kitchen. It was moved to Greenfield Village in 1933. For some reason, the folks at the Village seem to want to show this house as it looked in 1915 - 99 years after it was originally built. But, even of that 1915 era shown, they have done a tremendous job in thei...

The brick over the large fireplace of the Plympton house dates to 1640, to the original home of Thomas Plympton. Plympton was a founding father of the Puritan settlement of Sudbury, Massachusetts, and lived there with his wife, Abigail, and their seven children. This, after he came to North America from England as an indentured servant. According to the 1941 guidebook, Plympton was slain by Indians in 1676, but his descendants, including a Thomas Plympton who actively took part in the American Revolution, continued to live in this one room home. The original house of the 1st Thomas Plympton burned down in the early 1700's, and the generation of the family who were living there at the time rebuilt the home around the original chimney. It is considered to be the oldest American home in Greenfield Village. An unusual feature in this home is the convenient inside covered well, seen to the left of the ladder. Most wells, during this period in time, were outside the home. This primitive ...

According to the book, "American Diner Then and Now" by Richard Gutman, the Owl Night Lunch Wagon, acquired in dilapidated condition in 1927 and restored to its reconstructed glory shortly after, is the only remaining horse-drawn lunch wagon. It is a very good example of "fast food" from the 19th and early 20th centuries. According to a Ford cousin, Ford Bryan, in his book "Clara: Mrs. Henry Ford," Henry Ford patronized the Owl Night Lunch Wagon during his years working at Edison Illuminating. It was pulled to and from the curbside at Michigan and Griswold streets in Detroit by Reddy the bay horse, owned by John Colquhoun. It opened at 6 p.m. and left at daybreak - this at a time when restaurants in Detroit closed up by 8 p.m. There were originally stools inside the wagon and a window for take-out service. This 1890's diner was originally placed inside the Village in 1933, serving hamburgers to those first patrons of the Village. It was then moved insi...

According to the book ' A Home For Our Heritage' : "The public, notified by...articles in the nation's periodicals, knew well that Henry Ford had something going on behind his brick walls. The few curious passersby a day grew to about 400 a day early in the 1930's. By the late spring of 1933, however, a curious public had swelled to nearly 1000. To turn this many people away simply amounted to bad public relations. ...The following recommendations were made...: To operate Greenfield Village in a manner that will permit the visitor to feel as if he or she had been transported back a few years...it should be arranged that they are not herded through in groups with a guide having a set 'lingo' which becomes monotonous and detracts from the true atmosphere of the historic town. Visitors should be charged admission, adults 25 cents, children 10 cents." The book speaks on how there should be craftsmen in the respective shops, an old-time hotel keeper at t...

Kingston Cooper Shop (formerly known as Cooper Shop): Kingston Cooper Shop inside the Henry Ford Museum This 1785 structure from Kingston, New Hampshire, when rebuilt inside the Greenfield Village in 1932, became the oldest American craftshop in the Village. The cooper built watertight hogshead (a large barrel or a large cask) for commerce, barrels for shipping fruits or vegetables, buckets for maple syrup, and wooden pails needed in every home. Fatened without glue or nails, the staves were bound together by hickory hoops, and the bottoms fitted into grooves in the sides. The cooper used tools such as a froe, with which he split logs into boards and shingles; the joiner for smoothing edges; and the draw knife to shape the staves. While sitting on a shaving horse, he would use his feet to close the vise (by way of a lever) in which the staves are held. The cooper was a valued craftsman, and that his work was well done is proved by the buckets nearly 200 years old still around in antiq...

Early settlers in Michigan needed homes, barns, and shops. As farmers cleared the forests for more farm land, the trees provided a plentiful supply of wood. Sawmills were among the first mills established in towns and farming communities, and it was at these sawmills that the wood was cut into lumber to build the homes, barns, and shops. Sawmills were not only important to the setting in Greenfield Village, but they were also used extensively by architect Ed Cutler's crew to provide lumber for numerous construction and re-erecting projects. The 1855 Tripp Sawmill was originally from Franklin Center (now Tipton), Michigan, near Tecumseh in Lenauwee County and built by British immigrant Henry Tripp. (For years, Henry Tripp's son, J.D., was listed as the original builder, but recent information proves this to be false.) The sawmill featured an up and down saw similar to the one Henry Ford operated in his youth. Powered by a steam engine on the bottom floor, the vertical b...

1932 saw the continuation of buildings of trade and industry make their way to the Village. Hanks Silk Mill, built in 1810 by Rodney and Horatio Hanks in Mansfield, Connecticut, was one of them. The significance of this building comes from the fact that it produced the first machine-made silk in America. The Hanks brothers originally built the mill over a waterway which they had diverted from a stream. The water fell from a large flat rock onto a mill wheel. Once moved to Greenfield Village, the wheel was removed and a nearby grove of mulberry trees were planted especially for the mill, providing food for the young silkworms needed to produce the cocoons. Although the mulberry trees are still there, this production is no longer presented at the mill, as the time and energy it took to produce the silk was too time consuming for the little amount provided. The original machinery of this mill burned, leaving just a few iron parts. But, the visitor can still see the same type of wooden ree...