Edison Institute: Not Such a Catchy Name Today

Preface to "The Note in the Oven & Other Stories of Attending the Greenfield Village Schools in the 1950's"  (Part 1)

     The name of “The Edison Institute” is not as catchy today as it was when Henry Ford came up with it 80 years ago. You see, he had this really great idea for the Edison Institute. There would be three parts – first, a museum highlighting American invention and ingenuity; second, a working village of America’s historic homes, crafts and workplaces; and third, an educational institution with students making full use of the museum and village facilities. Each part merits a story all its own. United, the Edison Institute was and is an amazing and unique creation. Today it’s one of America's greatest living history attractions, a very fun place to visit and explore.

     I began this book as a short memoir of my school days at Greenfield Village but it grew. The images and memories in my mind leapt onto the pages as I typed and then I became totally immersed in the much larger and truly delightful story of the founding of the Edison Institute. The first three chapters provide the setting for my memoir. This one is about how the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village came into being, a long chapter – I was enthralled. The next chapter discusses the founding of the schools – briefly. The last chapter in this section brings the story home to me and why I was sent to the Greenfield Village Schools.

     The rest of the book is the story of my elementary school years with occasional commentaries related to the buildings’ histories and other odd little stories that I found fascinating. But let’s begin with the context for my school.

How “The Edison Institute” Came To Be

     The idea of a museum, village and school must have been bouncing around in Henry Ford’s fertile brain for many years before he decided to build them in his hometown of Dearborn, Michigan. He was a collector by nature, not just of things but of minds, as my friend Maureen puts it. Like any genius he could make associations which would completely bypass most of us. He linked ideas and inventions with people and places.

     Mr. Ford was an inventor and a visionary. He was a very rich industrialist with both the means and the opportunity to indulge his passion for collecting and restoring things that interested him. Today we recognize there is an obsessive-compulsive collecting disorder; there are people who cannot stop hoarding or collecting. I suppose some form of that disorder could have been part of Mr. Ford’s make-up as well because it appears that he was driven to collect…but not to display the items he collected. It seemed he was in no rush to do anything with his collections until he got the really great idea to dedicate the project in honor of his great friend, the inventor Thomas Edison…but that came later. Let’s start this part of the story with the collecting bug which many of us have -- and others can’t understand at all.

         Collecting Begins Innocently Enough

     Mr. Ford probably began collecting from his earliest days but one of his first known collections was of clocks and watches. By the time he was in his he was in his early 40’s, he was known to have started collecting paraphernalia associated with his lifelong hero Thomas Edison. Mr. Ford’s interests and collections were varied and developed along unusual and creative lines.

    Both Mr. and Mrs. Ford learned to read on the McGuffey Readers, the standard textbooks of the day, and their fondness for the books by William Holmes McGuffey formed the basis of another of Mr. Ford’s early collections. Beginning about 1914, he started collecting every copy he could get his hands on – some 468 of them.[1] Having never felt even the mildest interest in who wrote my own childhood textbooks, it’s hard for me to relate to the attachment Mr. Ford felt for the McGuffey family and the McGuffey Readers.

      Saving his childhood textbooks was apparently so satisfying a pastime that when he learned that the house he grew up in was scheduled for demolition with the widening of Dearborn’s Ford Road in 1919, he decided to relocate and restore his childhood home. It must have given him a taste for something more.

     When he heard a plea to “Save the Old Wayside Inn” in South Sudbury, Massachusetts in 1923, he responded by purchasing and restoring not only the Inn but a small village including 2600 acres. The Massachusetts project was so grand in scale that for a period of time it looked like Sudbury might have been the winner in the Henry Ford Museum-and-Village sweepstakes for fame and fortune. But Mr. Ford eventually settled upon Dearborn as the location for his Museum-Village-School dream. My friend Elayne points out that he could more easily control its development from Dearborn and I think she’s absolutely right.

     In 1924 he restored a tavern called the Botsford Inn in Farmington, Michigan. Some of the timber he used to rehabilitate the inn came from the Snow Woods, land near Oakwood Boulevard in Dearborn which had once belonged to my Snow family ancestors. According to my parents, who unfailingly repeated this story every time we went out to eat at the Botsford Inn, Mr. Ford was very aware of who owned what property in Dearborn. More than once he pointed to the beautiful timbers inside the Botsford Inn and reminded the Snow descendants that some of these came from the Snow Woods.

     In 1927 Mr. Ford learned about two more endangered buildings, the Clinton Inn and the Waterford General Store, both from small towns not far from his home. He had them preserved and moved to his company property on Oakwood Boulevard in Dearborn.

A Collector with a Vision

     Every now and then through these years, Mr. Ford would drop a statement or two about opening a museum, so at some level he must have realized he needed to do something with all the stuff he was amassing.

     About 1926, plans must have resolved within Mr. Ford’s mind because he told his agents to “Get everything you can find! I want at least one of every tool, utensil or machine ever used!” [1] This began a new phase in his ambitious program to collect household and agricultural implements, engines and machines. Within two years every bit of unused, roofed space in and around his company’s acreage in Dearborn was piled high with a veritable trash-and-treasure bonanza of American Stuff. Imagine when he started adding buildings to all the objects! Some may have questioned his sanity but not his enthusiasm. “Good Old American Ingenuity” was brought to Dearborn by an amazing array of antique dealers, special agents and by Mr. Ford himself. When people heard about Mr. Ford’s collections, gifts poured in from all over the country and even beyond.

     My mother wrote in her memories of Henry Ford: “I recall …Mr. Ford rounded up some of us children and took us to play among what seemed to be hundreds of old horse-drawn vehicles lined up in rows in some low dark sheds. What fun we had crawling in and out of old stage coaches, buggies and wagons and imagining the events that might have gone on when these vehicles were being used every day. I also remember that they were quite dusty, a contrast with most everything else in the Ford empire.”[2] My mother would have been about 11 years old. My friend Jeri’s aunt Helen had similar memories – she was about the same age and lived even closer to Oakwood Boulevard than my mother did. “Aunt Helen” remembered viewing the development as a very special playground until the walls went up, putting an end to the fun.

     Today it is hard to realize how unusual Mr. Ford’s contribution to the art of collecting was.He could have been acquiring the most famous and beautiful art and craft masterpieces in the world. That’s what most of the rich people did. But Mr. Ford recognized and recovered the ordinary everyday artifacts of American life that no one else would consider noteworthy. It was quite a statement of democracy, of seeing what ordinary American people created to improve their lives and how one development led to another and then another.

A Really Great Idea

     Let’s recap. It looks like all was going along swimmingly with Mr. Ford and his collecting and restoring. He wanted to create an institution whose primary purpose would be to demonstrate American ingenuity and bring life to the history of American technology but he was in no hurry to do so.

     Now let’s go to 1928; he’s in his 60’s and he gets a really great idea: “Let’s dedicate my collection of Americana to Thomas Edison and let’s reenact the exact moment of the lighting of the first successful light bulb with Mr. Edison himself, only this time with me beside him.” And then he thinks, “Let’s bring Mr. Edison’s Menlo Park Laboratories from New Jersey to Dearborn so that my recreation of that Magic Moment will be totally authentic!” Then “Let’s do it on the exact 50^th anniversary of the event!”

     Mr. Ford thought some more…“I know – we’ll bring Mr. Edison to the Greenfield Village by an old wood-burning train arriving at Smith’s Creek Depot which I will move to the site. Then we’ll drive Mr. Edison in a horse-drawn carriage to the newly reconstructed Menlo Park Laboratories for the reenactment of the scene that changed the world. How happy that will make Mr. Edison!”

     The order of these thoughts might be wrong and the quotations are of course totally in my mind but something like this might have happened. However, I can’t help but wonder what Mr. Edison really thought about Mr. Ford’s thoughtfulness regarding the train station and train.Here’s a quote regarding the little journey from an amazing book by the curator Geoffrey C. Upward, “A Home for our Heritage,” about the founding of the Edison Institute, every page a gem: “The trip itself… commemorated Edison’s work experiences on Michigan’s Grand Trunk line some 67 years earlier…At 10 a.m., on schedule, the 1860s Sam Hill wood-burning locomotive (renamed “the President” for the occasion) puffed its way through the rainy gloom on a special spur to the Smiths Creek Station platform…It pulled two passenger cars…and a baggage car, which was a replica of the one Thomas Edison worked in and burned as a boy.

     But do you remember the story about how Mr. Edison’s railroad career ended? The teenaged Mr. Edison worked on the railroad as a newsboy, but spent every free moment on his inventions, experimenting in a baggage car. One day he accidentally set fire to that baggage car (oops) and was thrown off the train by the conductor who grabbed the youngster’s ear so hard that Mr. Edison was deaf in that ear for the rest of his life. This was near Port Huron, Michigan and Smith’s Creek Depot was the railroad station closest to where Mr. Edison was thrown off the train.[4]

     So did Mr. Edison find happiness seeing the reconstructed baggage car and the relocated and restored Smith’s Creek Depot? Did he feel secret triumph while riding the old train as the guest of honor rather than the fired newsboy of his youth? I hope so.

Thomas Edison’s Big Autograph

     But let’s return to the preparations for the Big Day of the Dedication. For a time during the planning process Mr. Ford seriously considered inhabiting his village with workers and their families, which is why he hid modern lighting and plumbing out-of-sight in his pre-utilities-era buildings. In fact, while Mr. Ford’s village was being built, some workers were allowed to live in the buildings and a baby named J. Jordan Humberstone[5] was even born there in 1929 in the Sarah Jordan Boarding House. Another consideration for a brief time was that an Indian village would be located in the Rouge River flatlands.

     Soon after the decision was made to build the Museum-and-Village-and-School on Oakwood Boulevard, Mr. Ford brought Thomas Edison’s Fort Myers Laboratory from Florida to Dearborn and restored both the building and its machinery. In September of 1928, he invited Thomas Edison to visit the site. They went to the Village where they formally re-started the Fort Meyers machinery and then to a ceremony on the museum site. Here Mr. Ford handed Mr. Edison a spade that had once belonged to Luther Burbank (Remember all that tool-collecting? Who was Luther Burbank you ask? He was a pioneer in agriculture, sort of a horticultural inventor who had just died in 1926).

     Going back to the 1928 event, Mr. Edison thrust the spade into a hardening concrete block and walked off, leaving his footprints in the cement. With Mr. Ford beside him, he then inscribed his signature next to the spade. The symbolism was one of Mr. Ford’s thoughts: to demonstrate the union between Agriculture – Luther Burbank’s spade – and Industry – Mr. Edison representing the Edison Institute, a showplace of mankind’s technological progress. This concrete block is the museum’s cornerstone, always prominently displayed. It certainly gets my attention every time I see it – a poignant reminder that these people, these gigantic figures in world history, were once alive on this spot of cement. For those of you who keep chronological track of this story, keep in mind that this cement etching was over a year before the actual dedication.

A Frenzy of Preparations

     Mr. Ford decided to hold the dedication ceremony on October 21, 1929, the 50^th anniversary of Edison’s incandescent lamp known as the Golden Jubilee of Light. It’s hard to imagine the enormity of the project. There was a collection of objects that could take years to catalogue and label. There was a 13-acre museum and an 81-acre village to design and to build. There were buildings that still needed to be acquired and transported. There were architects, craft workers, skilled and unskilled laborers and I’m sure many other people that had to be retained and put to work. The complications and details had to be endless. From what I gather from people who knew him, the biggest complication had to have been Mr. Ford himself.

     Mr. Ford didn't just say “Do it!” and all his hard-working minions and craftsmen and laborers worked their little hearts out to accomplish Mr. Ford’s dream. That might have been doable.But Mr. Ford was beside them every step of the way. So there was, I gather, a lot of back-stepping, side-stepping and jump-stepping with people and ideas falling off the steps altogether.  Mr. Ford had ideas about every single thing.

     The story is told that Mr. Ford came across a bricklayer whose wall was a little off and who tried to save the situation by adding lots of mortar. Mr. Ford happened by, saw the problem and the wall was redone, this time in perfect alignment.[6] I gather Mr. Ford “happened by” a lot.As the buildings arrived at the village they were put in one spot; then moved to another, depending on the plan-of-the-week. In fact Mr. Ford had them moved around so much that the workers simply kept them up on blocks. Apparently there was a plan for the village but the only places that stayed put in this plan were the village green and the Menlo Park complex.

     There were special challenges along the way, one of the first being the aforementioned Menlo Park. Mr. Edison and Mr. Ford traveled to the original sight in New Jersey to see what remained so that they could be relocated to Mr. Ford’s village. The year was 1929 and the Menlo Park Laboratories had been relocated to new larger facilities in West Orange, New Jersey some 40 years earlier. What they found was that the original buildings, with the exception of the glass shed and Sarah Jordan Boarding House, were gone; either they’d been moved, burned or destroyed by looters. They only saved some planks and bricks from the laboratories and so turned their attention to creating an exact replica. But before they left, Mr. Ford hired people to literally dig up the dirt all around the Menlo Park complex, looking especially for failed experiments and the burn-piles. They were successful. Those objects, along with tons of New Jersey soil (so that Menlo Park would always rest on NJ land), were transported to Dearborn to be displayed on shelves in the restored glass shed. The very strange but wonderful display was of broken glass, odd shaped wire, and dirty objects – all original, dug up in New Jersey and proudly on view in Greenfield Village -- the debris of genius and an early demonstration of archaeology. My visual memory from the 1950’s is of clods of dirt and dirty objects on clear glass shelving.

     Now I’m trying to picture the scouts, agents and dealers out around the country on a wild buying spree. Mr. Ford’s project was becoming so well known that his agents found prices were higher as soon as the seller knew who was doing the purchasing. The agents learned to travel incognito. Arranging for the transport of the new acquisitions to Dearborn was another set of challenges. With a small farm implement it would seem manageable – trains were plentiful and affordable. But a building? A historical building had to be carefully and painstakingly unassembled, moved and reassembled, every brick and board and rock lovingly numbered and/or lettered. Wow.

     I love the story of the Lincoln Courthouse, which had been a dilapidated private house in Postville, Illinois in 1929 when Mr. Ford’s agents located and purchased it. They were probably feeling quite pleased with their find, since Mr. Ford really wanted a building associated with Abraham Lincoln, who had practiced law in it twice a year, from 1840-1847. Buildings with Lincoln connections – and up for sale – must have been hard to come by. As soon as the people of Postville learned that Henry Ford had bought their piece of history, they tried to get a court injunction to stop the sale, but their efforts were thwarted. Mr. Ford’s agents brought in their own workers and in just a few days had the roof, walls and building flattened and carted off. I find it fascinating that 24 years later, in 1953, a replica was built on the original site and called the Postville Courthouse State Historic Site. I wonder if anyone besides me is interested in visiting it.

Meanwhile Back at the Museum...

     Meanwhile back at the museum, work proceeded quickly but not quickly enough. Mr. Ford had hired the architect Robert O. Derrick in 1928. When asked how he would design Mr. Ford’s proposed museum, he said the first thing he’d do is to get permission to copy Independence Hall in Philadelphia. This delighted Mr. Ford so he hired him. Mr. Derrick was well trained but Mr. Ford wouldn’t allow him to put in balconies and basements for the museum, which is how all the great museums of the day handled their display and storage needs. Mr. Ford wanted to be able to see every worker and every worker had to be on the main floor (How do you spell “control issues”?).

     The Independence Hall replica was exact. It even included the original mistakes which Mr. Ford insisted be retained – the tower is a few inches off. However the Philadelphia Independence Hall stood so close to the street that when they added the tower, it had to sit on the backside of the hall, away from the street. Mr. Ford and Mr. Derrick wanted the building to be as true to the original as possible but they also wanted the beauty of the tower proudly reigning over the main, street-side entrance to the Museum. How did they solve the problem? They simply turned the building around. Today, the central entrance to the Henry Ford Museum is the duplicate of the back of Philadelphia's Independence Hall. I think the Dearborn one is prettier -- don't you?

     Preparations for the Dedication Ceremony were racing ahead. Edsel Ford, Henry Ford’s only child, was designated to be in charge of invitations to the 500 luminaries of the day. Apparently the invitations didn’t go out until four to five weeks beforehand which was unusually brief for these famous people. There is a record of correspondence with John D. Rockefeller Jr., beginning with a telegram dated October 4, 1929 (remember the invitation is for October 21), in which he says he will try to rearrange his schedule in order to attend. Edsel Ford’s cable in reply must have crossed in the mail with the next telegram from Mr. Rockefeller saying he has made the adjustments and will be there.

     There’s another set of letters exchanged with Percival Dodge who had apparently accepted as Mr. and Mrs. Dodge – and Mr. Henry Ford’s secretary writes that Mrs. Dodge is not invited!Mr. Dodge writes back to apologize for the error and accept on his own behalf.

     One week before the dedication, the museum’s interior had yet to be completed, the artifacts remained in storage and the village green had yet to be laid. The conscientious workers must have been in a state of high anxiety indeed. There’s an aerial photo of the project at this one-week marker showing the edge of the old tractor plant practically touching the museum (that section was torn down not long after); and there’s not one tree in the village.

The Dedication is Held, Ready or Not

     Monday, October 21, 1929 was rainy in Dearborn, Michigan. The President of the United States and his wife, Herbert and Lou Hoover, the guests of honor Thomas and Mina Edison, Henry and Clara Ford and other special guests boarded an old-fashioned train with a beautifully restored engine named the Sam Hill, newly labeled “The President”. The locomotive pulled two passenger cars and a baggage car. You can still see the engine and one of the passenger cars in the Henry Ford Museum today. The railroad carried the group from the Ford Rouge plant station to the newly restored Smith’s Creek Depot in Greenfield Village. The invited guests were already there to greet them. After all the other passengers had disembarked, President Hoover escorted Mr. Edison down from the train on specially constructed steps. Other guests included millionaire industrialists John D. Rockefeller, Jr., J.P. Morgan, Andrew Mellon, Charles Schwab, scientist Madame Marie Curie, Reformer Jane Addams, Orville Wright, humorist Will Rogers (his telegram said “Hope Hoover makes a good speech”), Walter P. Chrysler, R.E. Olds, Fred P. Fisher, George Eastman, and many others.

This postcard was dated Oct. 21, 1929 and sent on Dedication 

Day Day from the Village post office to my mother.

     Horse-drawn carriages took the guests to various stops around the Village and some employees dressed in period costumes to add to the party atmosphere. Most of the guests ate lunch at the Clinton Inn located on the new village green. The grass had been rolled out the day before. The Presidential party was whisked away to Mr. Ford’s Fair Lane estate for lunch.

     After the meals the guests could roam at will with a few special activities to involve and entertain them. These included the symbolic lighting of fires – President Hoover lit a fire in the Lincoln Courthouse fireplace and Mr. Edison lit a fire in the Menlo Park Machine Shop boiler. The rain never let up but it sounds like everyone had a great time and ended up very wet.

     Late in the afternoon the guests were transported back to their hotels so that they could dress up for the evening festivities. When they arrived at the banquet, here’s how attendee William Simonds described it: “As one stepped into the lobby of the museum that evening from the drenching outdoors, it was as if one had entered fairyland. All was candle-lit. Figures great in contemporary history filed up the broad winding staircase to leave their wraps, then descended to an array of glittering tables that stretched to the right under the brilliant candelabra to the speakers’ table.” [7]

      The banquet must have been thrilling. Mr. Ford wanted to add drama to the event by allowing no electricity until Mr. Edison had completed his reenactment. This was challenging for the caterers, Detroit’s Book-Cadillac Hotel, whose logistics would have been mind-boggling anyway with so many of America’s rich, powerful and world-renowned personages present. There were national, state and local politicians along with delegations from Japan and Europe. Imagine – supper for 400, every one of them used to superb food and service. I can’t help but think that had I been a member of the wait staff, I would surely have spilled something on somebody.

     Although there was a record-breaking international radio network in attendance, only NBC was allowed inside the hall and they broadcast the event internationally. With the whole world listening, it must have been rather exciting to sit by the radio in your own home in darkness and to imagine so many famous people in such a magnificent setting. Listeners had been asked to turn out their lights until a signal was given to relight. There is a partial transcript of the NBC broadcaster, Graham McNamee, and it is great fun to read.[8]

      Just as the meal was ending, Mr. Ford, Mr. Edison, President Hoover and Mr. Francis Jehl, one of Mr. Edison’s long-time associate inventors, left the hall in the rain to drive to the reconstructed Menlo Park laboratory which was lit with gas flames only. The day before Mr. Edison and Mr. Jehl had reconstructed the experiment of 50 years ago so that they could complete the test during the Jubilee Celebration.

      Finally, the moment was here – Mr. Edison connected the wires and the light slowly changed from a red wire to a bright white glow.[9] Then Mr. Edison threw a switch which was the signal to turn on the electric lights and ring the bells, Mr. Ford’s replica of the Liberty Bell pealing for the first time. All over Menlo Park (actually both Menlo Parks, as New Jersey had their own jubilee celebration that night), the museum’s banquet halls and the homes of the radio audience, people were startled all over again with the brilliance of Mr. Edison’s invention.

     Apparently Mr. Edison was “deeply moved by the entire tribute.” Although his voice was quivery, he was able to speak. He closed his brief remarks by saying: “This experience makes me realize as never before that Americans are sentimental and this crowning event of Light’s Golden Jubilee fills me with gratitude. I thank our President and you all. As to Henry Ford, words are inadequate to express my feelings. I can only say to you that in the fullest and richest meaning of the term—he is my friend.”[10]

Mr. Edison made one more trip to visit Mr. Ford at Menlo Park, Greenfield Village the following year, 1930; and Mr. Ford made at least one more trip to Fort Meyers, Florida to see Mr. Edison before he died in 1931. The Fords attended Mr. Edison’s funeral in West Orange, New Jersey and that ended a remarkable friendship.

      Whew!

     The story leading up to and including the dedication of the Edison Institute is absolutely thrilling to me, akin to reading the discovery of King Tut’s tomb by Howard Carter a few years earlier in 1922. Everyone labored so hard to bring joy to the event, most especially to Mr. Ford and Mr. Edison. And from this distant vantage point, it seems to have worked. Mr. Ford may have breathed a sigh of happy relief. His one regret was that he didn’t allow photographers at the banquet (flash photography caused smoke in those days) but he hired an artist to recreate the banquet in oils and that gigantic painting hangs in the Henry Ford Museum today.

     As for the Edison Institute, nothing was really complete – most of the objects that had been pouring into Dearborn for Mr. Ford were still gathering dust in old spaces waiting to be rediscovered and displayed; the multi-acre floor of the museum had not been finished, much less filled with museum collections. There were no trees in Greenfield Village and some of the 30 buildings were probably still up on blocks (I’m guessing).

     Only a few days after the dedication, the stock market crashed and Mr. Ford felt he had to devote himself to his company and the world economic situation. Nonetheless, the man was a veritable bundle of energy and now that his special project had been dedicated, I’d have thought it would have been opened to the public. But I’d have been wrong. Despite a high demand for admittance, the public waited nearly four years to be allowed in – the opening day was June 22, 1933.

[1] Frank Caddy, “Forward” to Geoffrey C. Upward, “A Home for our Heritage”, 1979

[2] Wendell Garrett, “Henry Ford the Collector” from “A Home for our Heritage,” 1979

[3] Katherine Moore Cushman, “Growing Up in Henry Ford’s Town”, 1979, from a speech delivered at Henry Ford Centennial Library in Dearborn, Michigan, on the occasion of Henry Ford’s 106^th birthday.
[4] Although this explanation for Thomas Edison’s deafness was repeatedly told throughout my childhood, I can’t verify it. In fact, I have found several references to a genetic hearing problem.

[5] From the Benson Ford Archives at The Henry Ford is this:  James Humberstone papers, 1916-1952 . History: While a senior at the Henry Ford Trade School in 1927, James Humberstone came to Henry Ford's attention through articles Humberstone wrote for the school newspaper, The Artisan. Less than a year later, he was curator of Ford's vast collection of antiques and Americana then in storage in the old Dearborn Tractor Plant. Although Humberstone had no training for such work, he was soon responsible for planning the layout and arrangement of the collection in the Edison Institute. Humberstone and his wife were the first inhabitants of the institute's Greenfield Village. Their son, James Jordan Humberstone, the only child ever born in the village, was born in the Sarah Jordan Boarding House in May of 1929.

I met Jordan Humberstone about 1980 when he gave a special after-hours tour of Greenfield Village. He took us to parts of the buildings in the Village that are not on tour. It was my favorite tour of the Village – he was charming and entertaining. (Note from Betsy Cushman 2009)

[6] Geoffrey C. Upward, “A Home for our Heritage,” 1979

[7]“A Home for Our Heritage” William A. Simonds, “Henry Ford, His Life, His Work, His Genius,” 1938. His son Austin appears in photos of the Village with my mother.

[8] “A Home for Our Heritage,” 1979, quoting William Adams Simonds

[9] “A Home for Our Heritage”

[10] “A Home for Our Heritage”

Henry Ford's Village School

     Henry and Clara Ford enjoyed children and had many ideas about what and how they should be taught. The Ford's donated time, talent and money to help many educational institutions, so I imagine it was no surprise to those who knew them to learn that the couple wanted to open a school on the grounds of the new Edison Institute. The concept of teaching American ingenuity in the midst of this great Museum-and-Village must have been intoxicating.

      The fact that the school opened before the Big Dedication Ceremonies for the Museum-and-Village testifies to its importance to Mr. Ford. Although Mr. Ford was forced to turn his attention to business in the 1930's (Black Tuesday was only weeks after the school opened), it seems pretty well accepted that Mr. Ford’s heart was in the schools he founded during those years. He spent every spare moment on campus. The schools had the power to involve, inspire and charm him and he was their unofficial headmaster until illness overtook him.

      On September 16, 1929, Mr. Ford greeted the original 32 students on their first day of school. They were in the first through fourth grades and began their education by experiencing what a one-room school house felt like, the Scotch Settlement School. Now located on the Village Green, the building had once been Henry Ford's school home only a few miles away. Mr. Ford had bought the school when it went on the market in 1923 and had it moved in the summer of 1929, arriving not long before the first students.

      What fun it must have been to have attended the Edison Institute Schools in those early years! Between the 1929 dedication and the June 22, 1933 public opening, the village and museum were only used by the school children, workers and invited guests. Mr. Ford told his employees that the students were to be encouraged in their curiosity and interest in the village and museum. I have an image in my mind of skilled and dedicated workers erecting beautiful new buildings like the Town Hall, and painstakingly restoring, brick by brick, board by board, old homes like Ann Arbor House, and creating displays of all sorts of collections of Americana in the museum. I see the students climbing about, asking questions and touching everything (all things I remember doing when a new house was built in my neighborhood). I think it might have been rather challenging for the workers.

     The guiding principle of the Edison Institute Schools was “to learn by doing,” a Thomas Dewey approach. Students planted gardens, learned a variety of crafts and mechanical skills in addition to their traditional book learning. They took field trips, some with Mr. Ford himself in happy attendance. He wanted some of the good parts of the one-room schoolhouse incorporated into the program such as older children helping younger ones.

      I think I remember hearing that Mr. Ford wasn’t known for his childhood success with academics, but was always thinking about experimentation and new ways of fixing things or solving problems. Didn’t he only have a sixth grade education? Perhaps today he would have been diagnosed with some form of Attention Deficit Disorder. It would make sense that his own experience could have given him some insights regarding the need for both traditional and non-traditional learning methodologies.

      Here are a few insights from “A Home for Our Heritage”[i]:

     “Henry Ford envisioned the entire complex as an educational institution, with students using the artifacts and exhibits for practical learning experiences. Some parts of the dream came true more successfully than others…

     ”Ford was determined that his students would learn practical skills so that their transfer from school to the working world would be less abrupt. Not all was hard work, however… Ford at times even encouraged pranks.

     “No tuition was charged. Henry Ford paid for everything. Chosen students came from a waiting list representing a variety of backgrounds and were not necessarily related to Ford Motor Company employees. Although a committee decided who would attend, Ford often added children after personal requests. He provided supplies, transportation, and lunches served on linen tablecloths with matching napkins.

     “Beginning in 1930, each day opened with a brief, non-denominational service in Martha-Mary Chapel. Ford often watched from the balcony, frequently accompanied by famous guests, such as will Rogers and George Washington Carver.

     “Enrollment climbed from 32 in 1929, to 190 in 1937, when the first high school class graduated, and to 300 in 1940…After Mr. Ford's death in 1947, the schools sorely missed Ford’s personal interest and support. By 1952, the high school closed, ending a fascinating era during which hundreds of fortunate children had learned Ford’s byword: ‘learning is living and living cannot be learned from books alone.’”

     “At its peak, the Village system would include nine school buildings, housing kindergarten through post-high school technical levels. The schools, like the Village and museum themselves, offered participants a truly unique experience.”

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[i] Geoffrey C. Upward, “A Home for Our Heritage,” 1979

Dearborn, Mr. Ford and Me

      The little dot of my personal involvement in the delightfully large story of the Edison Institute makes not a whit of impact in its rather fascinating history. However it was a challenge to write up my small part in the drama – my attendance in grades kindergarten through sixth – without the greater contextof the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village, Dearborn and Mr. Ford himself.

Having already discussed the Edison Institute, let’s talk about Dearborn and Mr. Ford. If you’ve ever lived or worked in Dearborn, you know that Mr. Ford was a complex character whose influence on the City was arguably greater than any other individual’s. My Snow ancestors arrived in Dearborn about the same time as the Ford family did in 1847 and there were connections, as there would be in any small town.

My great-great grandfather was a pioneer doctor who made his money more from real estate and farming than from doctoring. Dearbornites will probably recognize the Snow name – Snow Elementary School, Snow Woods, Snow Branch Library and Snow Hill Condominiums – but not know its origin. As one of the few area doctors in the latter half of the 19^th century, he occasionally treated members of the Ford family. I learned this from finding several Ford names among the entries in Dr. Snow’s journals in the Dearborn Historical Museum. I know that Mr. Ford eventually purchased some of the Snow lands, but I am not aware of any special relationship with the Ford family and my family until a friendship was forged between Dr. Snow’s granddaughter and Mrs. Henry Ford. They had much in common, in addition to their names – both were christened Clara.

Despite the 18-year difference in their ages, both Clara Snow and Clara Ford loved gardening and literature. With Katharine Bryant, Mrs. Ford’s sister-in-law and others, they founded the Dearborn Public Library and were active in two garden clubs. I have a few notes written to my Clara by Clara Ford. Here’s the best one: “Dear Clara, Just a short note, for with three weeks to see England, cannot take much time for writing. Staying the weekend with Lady Astor, charming woman, fine old house, beautiful grounds, want to tell you about it when I return…She had the King & Queen over for tea, and now we think we have seen England…” After Mrs. Ford’s death, Clara Snow wrote a small book on her reminiscences of Mrs. Ford.

There was a lovely Victorian clock which graced Clara Snow’s living room when I was growing up. The often-told family story is that the clock didn't work right and stopped altogether. On one of his visits, Mr. Ford noticed the problem and insisted on personally repairing it, which he did. The story goes on, however, that the repair didn't last long. The clock is still in the family...and still doesn't run.

Also still in the family is a child’s toolbox with three-quarter-sized tools, well used, that Mr. Ford had his craftsmen make for my mother’s eighth birthday. It has her name as "Katharine" in stylized letters on a brass plate on the lid. The story is that he gave it to her because he was so impressed that a little girl liked “making things” with carpentry. Dearborn was a small town then. She told me that at first she was afraid to use it, but that once she began to use the tools, she thoroughly enjoyed herself and kept it in her workshop area all her life. I remember grabbing tools out of it when I was a child, not knowing anything about its origins.

There are testimonials to Henry and Clara Ford in nearly every corner of Dearborn – statues and school names, for example. When Dearborn named its latest library the Henry Ford Centennial Library in 1979, it was because it opened on Mr. Ford’s birthday, July 30, 106 years after Mr. Ford’s birth. My mother was one of the speakers at that event and her talk was called “Growing Up in Henry Ford’s Town.” I quote in part: “It was a little like living near a kindly but unpredictable magician, who had only to wave a magic wand to cause all kinds of fascinating things to happen…But we could not but be aware of the tremendous power that he possessed; power that affected us all.”

I remember being told that Mr. Ford was a quirky kind of guy who liked things done his way. He thoroughly enjoyed children and loved to give them special surprises and opportunities. Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village were extensions of his mania for collecting and he wanted every item displayed, so allowed no storage space. At least, that’s the story I was told. I have read that no basement storage was built for other reasons (see earlier chapters), but, then, there are lots of conflicting stories about Mr. Ford.

The village was arranged the way he wanted it and that sometimes changed. He was obsessive about historical accuracy in the details of the creation of Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village…unless he liked it better otherwise. For example, he liked most of the village buildings painted white, regardless of the color they had been originally. He wanted the village to reflect pure Americana…unless he liked something else; hence a Swiss chalet and a Cotswold cottage are intertwined with Noah Webster’s home and McGuffey’s birthplace.

When Mr. Ford was alive, the Greenfield Village Schools were run the way he wanted them to run and the children told wonderful stories about their personal interactions with Mr. Ford. They had a really special experience. Many of those traditions were carried on by Mrs. Ford for the three years she lived past the death of her husband.

My parents told me that they had a lively discussion about sending their children to a private school founded by Mr. Ford versus sending them to the public school. The fact that we ended up at the Village schools must have been difficult because they tended to oppose the concept of privilege. The Dearborn schools were quite good, in any case. I speculate that my mother was acutely aware of the Mr. Ford’s darker side but had a genuine fondness for him as well. It seems to me that she had an appreciation for the historical significance of the privileges she had enjoyed growing up knowing the Ford’s. Perhaps she wanted to offer her kids a taste of that special experience by allowing them to attend the Greenfield Village Schools.

Mr. Ford died a few months before my brother started kindergarten at Greenfield Village and not long before I turned two years old. Mrs. Ford died just as I was starting kindergarten. My brother remembers meeting Mr. Ford who seemed to him to be a small wizened old man who enjoyed being the center of attention. As for me, I know my parents tried ever-so-hard to keep alive my memory of the day my great aunt Clara Snow took me to see Mrs. Ford and feed her peacocks. Apparently, the peacocks scared me. I still feel the need to whisper the fact that I don’t remember it or Mrs. Ford.

It was hard for me to fully comprehend the relationships my parents had with the Ford’s. For my mother, it was all of her life until both the Ford’s had passed away. My dad only knew Mr. Ford for a few years. The Ford’s were important to them and they often spoke of the Ford’s or of things that I now know are Ford-related. My parents and the older generation never called Henry and Clara Ford anything but “Mr. and Mrs. Ford” within my hearing.

After the death of both Fords, the schools and indeed the entire Edison Institute floundered. The era of obsessively collecting America’s past had ended; the high school closed. Those of us who were schooled in the remaining years of the elementary program from 1952 to 1969 experienced a slow separation from Mr. Ford’s vision. Mr. Ford had been the underlying force who gave life to the program and that dream faded with the day-to-day loss of Mr. Ford’s presence.

But that is not to say we didn’t have our own special experience or cannot tell our own wonderful stories. We didn’t have Mr. Ford or his special guests surprising us in the balcony during our daily chapel services…but there were often guests in the balcony and the daily chapel services were carried on by the elementary school students. Sometimes the guests were our parents, and sometimes the chapel services were tortuous – say if you were the shy child reciting the poem for the day – but the traditions continued. Mr. Ford’s favorite songs were still sung and his favorite poems still memorized. We didn’t do our own gardening or homemaking or photography but we experienced living history in some fun and unusual ways and learned to do – or see demonstrated – more crafts and industrial skills than I have ever desired.

I’m not sure that in retrospect my parents would have made the same decision regarding sending their children to the Village schools as opposed to the public schools. But speaking for myself, I am glad they opted for this particular private school. The years I spent there greatly enriched my life and there’s always therapy to overcome the parts of me that weren’t enriched. I’m sure it wasn’t perfect in the public schools, either.