Chapter 18 - Blood and Gore and Nailed to the Floor -- History

Learning History in the 1950's 

     I love history. Is this because I attended Greenfield Village Schools? It certainly helped. Imagine attending school in an historic building and being herded down the lane to visit another historic place and told its fascinating (sometimes) history. It was fun – what a great way to learn. Of course, the parts that stayed with me must have been particularly appealing to a child – secret passages, blood and gore, an odd sounding voice recording of “Mary had a little lamb.” And there’s always that memory thing – was I really told “such-and-such”, and if so, was it fact? Such fun to figure out.

     One of my favorite memories is also one of the earliest – a visit to the Plympton House. It was tiny and cozy, and I loved the story we were read about the Plympton family and their trials in this house (none of which I recall). The best piece of furniture was a bench by the fireplace. There's a photo in one of the old Heralds. If you look carefully, you can see the hole that was cut out below the seat for the family cat. I remember being surprised and warmed by the knowledge that a pioneer family, challenged for survival, would make a snug “hidey-hole” for their kitty right there in the bench by the fire. I wish I could find that bench. There’s a similar one in the Plympton House today but no “hidey-hole”. If it weren’t for this photo, I’d think the bench with the hole for the cat was only in my imagination.

     Abraham Lincoln practiced law two or three times a year in the Logan County, Illinois court house back in the 1840’s, and it was an important part of the Greenfield Village Schools. The rocking chair in which President Lincoln was assassinated, complete with blood stained fabric, stood rotting in a glass case inside this building throughout my youth.

      I remember my surprise when visiting Washington D.C. as a child that they, too, claimed to have the rocking chair of assassination infamy. After that, I would tell visitors to Dearborn that we had one of the two chairs in which President Lincoln was assassinated right here, wrongly assuming that the true chair was in D.C. So imagine my amazement when laboratory tests in later years proved that Henry Ford had actually put his hands on the Lincoln chair. Fortunately, they realized that the poor conditions in the Logan County Courthouse were ruining the chair and moved it to a healthier home in the Henry Ford Museum. It's even been properly (I assume) restored. I also learned that the blood stains which had so fascinated my youthful self were actually a build-up of men’s hair oil. But there must have been blood stains, too, right? I suppose I really don’t have to know which is which…but it would be interesting.

     In another old photo, you can see small parts of the slave huts which had been placed behind and to the right of the Logan County Courthouse. Not historically accurate, the location made sense if you thought of Abraham Lincoln as the Great Emancipator. The slave huts stood next to the courthouse as a quiet reminder of the cruelty and tragedy of the antebellum South and in my child-mind, fit in well with the violence of the Lincoln Chair. Today the slave huts are found at the end of the block, and are a small part of a much larger grouping of buildings that help explain the reality of slavery in American History. It’s all very interesting and well-done, but I still like the way I remember them before.

      The “secret” hole for the colonists’ cat was almost as good as the secret passage in Secretary House (today it’s called the Giddings Family Home). The house was built about 1750 in New Hampshire with the most exciting feature possible – a secret passage. In the closet there is a wooden coat hook that turns to reveal a secret staircase leading to the attic (or so I remember – I haven’t seen it work in over 50 years!). I thought we were told the staircase was used to escape from the Indians, but it could have been used to store weapons during the Revolutionary War and fugitive slaves during the Underground Railroad days. In any case, I am so glad that when they relocated the building to Greenfield Village in 1929, they restored this feature – it’s a great idea. Every house should have a secret passage.

     We made annual pilgrimages to Thomas Edison's Menlo Park. I heard Edison’s voice reciting “Mary had a little lamb” many times, and remember seeing lots of dirt and oddments on display which we knew Mr. Ford had transported from New Jersey. If I learned nothing else about Thomas Edison, I learned about his early boxcar experiments when he was selling newspapers and candy on the train, and I was duly horrified by the story of the inventor’s experiment-gone-awry that ended with a fire and his deafness. There are many stories about how Mr. Edison became deaf, but the one I most remember from my childhood was that a mean railroad employee grabbed young “Tom” by the ears to throw him off the train.

     I knew that Thomas Edison epitomized “The Inventor,” and that he invented lots of things, including the light bulb and the phonograph. And I gathered from observing the laboratory’s hundreds of glass jars filled with powders of all sorts that inventing is a very strange business indeed. Who would think you could create a light bulb from powder? I did.

     When Edison recreated the light bulb invention at the Golden Jubilee in 1929 and sat back in his chair, Henry Ford had the chair nailed to the floor. Isn’t that cool? And don’t you like the pipe organ against the wall in the laboratory? Now I know that the workers enjoyed music as an early form of relaxation therapy (sounds like therapy to me), but when I was a child, I assumed that the organ was just another Edison invention.