Late Summer Road Trip – Greenfield Village (2)

…continuing with our late summer road trip and our exploration of Greenfield Village/The Ford Museum in Dearborn Michigan.

In addition to the 2.5 mile steam locomotive journey around the Village and the opportunity to take a ride in a Ford Model T, many prefer another old time way of seeing the village…or just taking a break from all the walking one does here.  There are a variety of horse drawn carriages and wagons as well as this omnibus being pulled by a team of white horses. 

Horse drawn omnibuses were the first public conveyance in American cities.  Dating back to 1831, they made getting around these rapidly expanding urban areas relatively quick and convenient.

This colorful and classy carousel is located in the Main Street section of Greenfield Village.  It was built in 1913 by the Herschell-Spillman Company in North Tonawanda New York.  It was first installed in San Francisco California and then it found a home in Spokane Washington in 1923 where it continued to operate until 1961.  It spent years in storage until it was acquired by The Henry Ford Museum, subsequently being installed in Greenfield Village in the early 1970s.

Colorful carousels were very popular in the early 1900s.  They were found all across the USA in amusement parks, public parks and seaside resorts.  This particular carousel is a ‘menagerie’ carousel and the hand-carved animals offer riders a wide variety of choices…ranging from chariots, to some beautiful horses, a rooster, a stork, a fierce looking pig and a lion. 

Horses were the most common animals to be found on carousels, but in this case, Herschell-Spillman created this hoptoad, aka a frog.  Herschell-Spillman was the only carousel maker to include a frog in the mix of critters and, indeed this is the only American carousel animal that exists that wears human clothing. 

There were 4 differently names used by Herschell carousel companies and all were located in North Tonawanda New York.  One of the company’s specialties was the production of portable carousels that could be used by traveling carnival operators.  Herschell carousels were shipped all around the world, including South Africa, India, Tahiti and Mexico.  There are about 148 antique, hand-carved wooden carousels still existing in the USA and Canada.  Seventy-one (71) of them were manufactured in North Tonawanda by one of the four Herschell companies.

This may look like a large home on the outside but in reality, this is a fairly accurate reproduction of Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park New Jersey laboratory.  Henry Ford had it built in 1928 as part of a recreation of the Edison’s expansive Menlo Park complex.  The original complex had been mostly destroyed by fire…and only 2 structures had survived.

Henry Ford wanted to honor the life and work Thomas Edison.  They were close friends.  Ford had to rely on the memory of an 81 year old Edison as well as Edison’s associates to recreate the laboratory.  Following Edison’s move to Menlo Park New Jersey in 1876, he had the original Laboratory building constructed in 1878.  It contained his entire operation…with his assistants, offices, a library and the machine shop.  This building is where Edison’s development of the incandescent lightbulb initiated a transformation of the entire world. 

More than any other inventory in history, Edison is responsible for the technologies that modernized the world.  When he died in 1931, he held 1,093 patents covering everything from telegraphs to telephones, electric power generation and lighting, sound recording, motion pictures, storage batteries as well as mining and cement technology.  In retrospect, he created the process of modern invention…a collaboration of scientists, machinists, designers and others, all working together in a single place to research, develop and manufacture new technologies.  Here in East Tennessee, the Oakridge Labs are an ongoing example this type of collaboration.

This is referred to as the Edison Homestead.  Edison’s great-grandparents had moved to Nova Scotia Canada after the American Revolution because they’d supported the British…and they had to flee when Britain lost the war.  Thomas Edison’s grandparents moved west and built this home in Vienna Ontario Canada in 1916.  Samuel Edison and Nancy Elliot, Thomas’ father and mother were married in the home’s Sunday parlor in 1828.  As a child Thomas spent many summers here, visiting his grandfather.  Henry Ford moved the home to the Village in 1933.

The preceding old photo shows Henry Ford (1863 - 1947) and Thomas Edison (1847 – 1931).  Despite their 16 year age difference, they were close friends.  They even went on road trips together!  The relationship began when Ford worked for the Detroit Edison Illuminating Company in the 1890s.  In 1914, the Ford family first visited the Edison’s in Fort Myers Florida.  Ford purchased the adjacent property on the banks of the Caloosahatchee River.  Ford made sure that he spent time with Edison in Fort Myers on one day every year…Edison’s birthday.  In 1912, Henry Ford asked Edison to design a battery for a self-starter in his automobiles.  It was introduced on the Ford Model T.  In October 1929, Ford staged a 50^th Anniversary celebration of Edison’s incandescent light…only 4 years before Edison died. 

I only covered two of the Edison related facilities that were recreated or moved to Greenfield Village.  The other facilities that comprise the “Edison at Work” section of Greenfield Village include the Fort Meyers Laboratory, Edison Illuminating Company, Menlo Park Glass House (original), Menlo Park Machine Shop, Menlo Park Woodworking Shop and the Menlo Park Office and Library.

This is the Sarah Jordan Boarding House.  It was built in 1870 in Menlo Park New Jersey and moved by Henry Ford to Greenfield Village in 1928.  Although technically not a part of Edison’s Menlo Park complex, it was part of the support structure for the complex. 

Edison’s Menlo Park complex was an all-male environment.  The closest daily involvement of women…other than the fact that Edison and some of his key staffers were married, was at the Sarah Jordan Boarding House.  It was operated by Sarah Jordan, a distant relative of Thomas Edison.  She offered room and board to Menlo Park’s unmarried employees/men.  In addition, the house played host to the experimental lighting system installed throughout Menlo Park in 1879.

These slave quarters for enslaved African Americans were built ca. 1820 on the Hermitage Plantation that was located a bit north of Savannah in a rice-growing area.  Enslaved workers built about 50 cabins with this brick, which was an unusual building material for slave quarters.  About 200 slaves worked on the plantation and lived in similar structures.

The above old postcard is from the early 1900s and it shows some of the slave quarters at the Hermitage Plantation.  The enslaved workers not only cultivated rice, they also manufactured bricks, cut lumber, built rice barrels and produced cast iron products.  The bricks were the big money maker and, as the result of slave labor, Henry McAlpin was very prosperous indeed.  The brick slave quarters shown in the first photo were moved to Greenfield Village in 1934.

This home was built ca. 1880.  Amos and Grace Mattox, both descended from enslaved African Americans, raised their 2 children in this rural Georgia farmhouse in the 1930s, the heart of the Great Depression.  Amos, who was born ca. 1889, grew up in this home in the midst of the worst years of Southern segregation.  He married Grace in 1909.

Amos farmed, raised livestock, barbered, and was a shoemaker as well as a preacher.  Grace had a vegetable garden and chickens to tend.  She also sewed, canned, cooked and helped out their neighbors.  During these hard times Amos also worked as a laborer for a couple different railroads and at a local sawmill. 

The Mattox family home as shown at Greenfield Village, provides a glimpse of what life was like in the 1930s, in the middle of the Great Depression.  Low prices and little demand for farm products exacerbated the crisis for farmers across the USA and many just abandoned their land.  Amos did sell off portions of his land to come up with a bit of cash now and then.

This is the ca. 1790 log home where Anna and Alexander McGuffey lived for 5 years and had 3 children before moving west to Ohio.  It’s a typical Scots-Irish log home of the type that were built in the heavily forested area of southwestern Pennsylvania in the late 1700s.  Their second child was William Holmes McGuffey (1800 – 1873), a man who, later in life, created the popular Eclectic Readers for frontier schoolchildren.

The McGuffey family was Scots-Irish, strict Presbyterians who had migrated from the Scottish Lowlands to Ulster in Northern Ireland over a period of several centuries.  During the 1700s, many of these folks immigrated to Pennsylvania, where land was readily available for settlement. By the end of the American colonial period, over 30% of Pennsylvania’s population was Scots-Irish.

In 1934, Greenfield Village built this ‘McGuffey School’ from barn logs recovered from the 1790s southwestern Pennsylvania farmstead where textbook author William Holmes McGuffey was born.  Rustic schoolhouses like this one were where children on the frontier learned to read.  McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers provided an easy and standardized way for them to learn. 

William Holmes McGuffey completed his formal schooling at Miami University of Ohio and then he taught there from 1826 to 1836.  He saw a great need for a system of standardized education, especially for children of immigrants and those living along the frontier.  He made his Eclectic Readers interesting by including stories, poems, essays and speeches from a variety of sources.  The Eclectic Readers progressed from simple stories and lessons to more complex materials as children progressed.  These books were often the children’s primary source of information about history, philosophy and science.  A total of 6 Eclectic Readers were produced, 4 by William Holmes and 2 by his brother, Alexander.

During the second half of the 1800s, the Eclectic Readers were the most widely circulated textbooks in the USA but they continued to be popular and utilized well into the 20^th Century.  Laurie’s mother and aunts used them in school.  These textbooks influenced such luminaries as Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, as well as Andrew Carnegie and the Wright Brothers.  Henry Ford was among the last generation of children to be educated by the McGuffey Readers.  Ford considered McGuffey as one of his great heroes, given his ability to spark young imaginations.  The Readers were among the first objects reflecting the American experience that Ford collected.  By the 1930s, he had amassed 468 copies of 145 different editions.

We decided that we needed a break…to sit down and have something to eat, so we stopped by “A Taste of History Restaurant”, which features seasonal, locally sourced and historically minded recipes.  There was a wide variety of food to choose from as the restaurant is set up much like a big food court with many dining opportunities.  We weren’t impressed with our choices but it was fuel that enabled us to continue our exploration of Greenfield Village and The Ford Museum.

The Eagle Tavern was a stagecoach tavern that was built in Clinton Michigan, 50 miles west of Detroit, back in 1831.  During the first half of the 1800s, taverns dotted the countryside, offering food, drink and accommodations to travelers.  This was a period of massive migration with new towns and farms being established across the country.  Rapid change was coming to the United States…

Calvin Wood and his family arrived in Tecumseh Township in about 1834.  From 1849 through 1854, Calvin operated this tavern.  Not only was this a place for food, drink and accommodations, it also provided a place to socialize and learn the latest news.  There was even a ballroom upstairs where dances and other community events took place.

In 1927, Henry Ford bought the Eagle Tavern Building and he brought it to Greenfield Village.  Originally, it served as a cafeteria for Edison Institute students and then for visitors.  It was opened as an upscale restaurant for Greenfield Village guests in 1982...and yes, it does serve alcohol.

This General Store was built in 1857 in Waterford Michigan.  Regarding the store’s current name, James R. Jones were one of 9 different proprietors who ran a general store in this building from 1857 to 1927.  Jones operated the store from 1882 to 1888, selling items like coffee, sugar, fabric and shoes.  He also had the first phone in town!

Henry Ford brought the store to Greenfield Village in the 1920s where it was re-erected on the Village Green by 1928.  It was initially called The Waterford Country Store.  It formed the core of a series of structures that Ford considered to symbolize America’s spirit of community.  Other key structures that followed included a schoolhouse, courthouse, the tavern, a town hall and a chapel.

The first photo shown above shows the Country Store up on blocks and ready to move ca. 1927, when Henry Ford bought it for his expanding Greenfield Village.  Timing is everything as the store/building had to be moved in any case as a new structure was scheduled to be built on the property.  At the time of Ford’s purchase, the store was being operated by its 9^th general store operator, August Jacober.  The second photo shows the inside of the store in the late 1920s.  Note the long shelves of products grouped appropriately along each side of the store.

The Smiths Creek Depot, built in 1858, stood alongside the rails of the Grand Trunk Western Railway, about 10 miles southwest of Port Huron Michigan.  Like most small town depots, the Smith Creek Depot was the center of action, not only a place to catch a train but also a place where customers sent and received packages and telegrams.  They also could catch up on the latest news and share gossip.

Remember Thomas Edison?  Well he did start life in humble beginnings.  He worked on the Port Huron to Detroit Grand Trunk Railroad route where, as a teenager, he sold newspapers and candy.  He would go by the Smiths Creek Depot every day along that route…that it until 1863 when he accidentally set the baggage car on fire while performing one of his experiments on the train. 

Henry Ford found Edison’s story about the accidental fire quite amusing.  In 1929, Ford bought the Smiths Creek Depot and moved it to Greenfield Village, just in time for ceremonies held for the official opening of the Village and Edison’s 50^th Anniversary of inventing a practical incandescent lamp.  The event was called “Lights Golden Jubilee”, with Ford, Edison, President Herbert Hoover and other arriving by train to the depot.  Others who attended the celebration included John D. Rockefeller Jr., Orville Wright and Will Rogers.

We were tuckered out and we still had a lot more to see.  As it was, I think that we only saw 50 – 60% of Greenfield Village.  I did get the first photo of “The Edison” locomotive…and then I ‘borrowed’ the second photo from the Internet.  The “Edison” is based on a 0-4-0 switcher locomotive that was built ca. 1870 by the Manchester Locomotive Company.  Henry Ford purchased this locomotive from the Edison Portland Cement Company in 1832.  He had it rebuilt into a 4-4-0 wheel arrangement at Ford Motor Company’s Rouge locomotive shop.  A bit later on it went into regular service on Greenfield Village’s railroad.

I did miss several railroad related attractions as our time to roam the Village ran out.  We didn’t see the Detroit, Toledo and Milwaukee Railroad’s roundhouse, the adjacent locomotive turntable, the coaling tower and water tower or the Edison Illuminating Company’s Station A.  In addition, Greenfield Village apparently has at least 1 other steam locomotives in the inventory.  It is the Torch Lake Locomotive, which was built by the Mason Machine Works in 1873.  

FYI, Manchester Locomotive Works was a company in Manchester New Hampshire that built steam locomotives and steam fire engines in the 1800s.  It built its first locomotive for the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad in 1855.  In 1901, Manchester and 7 other locomotive manufacturing firms merged to form American Locomotive Company (ALCO), but the new company stopped making locomotives in 1913

There are close to 100 structures in Greenfield Village…but we were about done in…and we still wanted to see part of The Ford Museum that is inside a very large building.  First we decided to give our feet a rest, so we opted to take a ride in a Model T ‘woody’. ($8.00 each) One of the staff members responsible for loading visitors into these old autos took this photo. 

When the ride was over, we left Greenfield Village for the relatively short walk over to The Ford Museum…and that’s where I’ll pick up the story the next time.

Just click on any of the photos to enlarge them…

Thanks for stopping by for a visit!

Take Care, Big Daddy Dave