Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Greenfield Village - America's Hometown


Eagle Tavern on the Village Green





In the summer of 1896, in a shed behind his house on Bagley Avenue in Detroit, Henry Ford finished his first experimental automobile, the Quadricycle, and took it for a test drive around his neighborhood.








In Dayton, Ohio, Orville Wright waited on customers at the Wright Cycle Company while his brother Wilbur worked in the back room on the mechanics that would lead to the world's first successful airplane.






Charles Steinmetz, who revolutionized the use of alternating current, spent that summer writing and studying in his newly-built cabin retreat overlooking Viele's Creek near his home in Schenectady, New York.










Not long ago a friend and I visited all three of these buildings. While we were at it, we stopped by the Illinois courthouse where Abraham Lincoln tried law cases; Thomas Edison's Menlo Park, New Jersey laboratories; and from a less glorious part of American history, the Savannah, Georgia Hermitage Planation slave quarters.


It's a quintessential American journey, but you don't need to hit the open road for Detroit, Dayton, Schenectady or Savannah to see these buildings. You'll find them all - along with dozens of other original structures that document 300 years of American history - at Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan. The 80-acre village, dubbed America's Hometown, is a National Historic Monument.

Greenfield Village was the creation and passion of Henry Ford, the founder of the Ford Motor Company and a life-long proponent of the rural way of life. Ironically, the good-paying factory jobs on Ford's assembly lines were responsible for the movement of large numbers of people from farms to big cities. Ford spent millions of dollars and personally scoured the countryside to find buildings and objects for Greenfield Village and the adjacent Henry Ford Museum. His aim was to document the everyday life of ordinary Americans and show how technology changed their lives.

When Greenfield Village was dedicated in 1929, President Herbert Hoover, Thomas Edison, Marie Curie, Orville Wright and John D. Rockefeller, Jr. were among the dignitaries in attendance. Albert Einstein spoke by radio from Germany.

It was Einstein's theory of relativity that gave credence to the idea that time travel might be possible. In the century since, many theories have been proposed, but to date time machines remain the purview of science ficition.



Time travel may never be possible, but for a wonderful glimpse into the past, at least into America's past, visit Greenfield Village. In addition to historic buildings, there are craft demonstrations, dramatizations of historical events, period restaurants, shops, a steam railroad, Model-T excursions and a 1913 Herschell-Spillman carousel where you can ride a horse, a lion or even a big green frog.


 

Have fun,
Geraldine








To see my photos of Greenfield Village, click here.

For more information on Greenfield Village, click here.


Photos by Geraldine Calisti Kaylor





3 comments:

  1. Oh, I love traveling to places like this! Thanks for the tour--I've never been to Greenfield Village. And I have only been to the "real" Menlo Park Edison lab site in NJ of those you mentioned here. What a unique idea Ford had, and yes--as you said, how ironic that his own business helped change our nation--in many ways! Sounds like that was a really interesting trip!

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  3. I loved hitching along with you through sites where many of my cultural heroes trekked — including Abraham Lincoln, Madame Curie, Albert Einstein, and Charles Steinmetz. The last is a name I had not thought of in a very long time. The German engineer/mathematician suffered from a curvature of the spine that left him a hunchback-dwarf, but with an extraordinary mind. He had purchased a suit to wear to his oral exams but devastated when told they were being waived for him. To placate him the faculty administered the exams, no more than a formality for him (he knew far more than his professors). When he arrived at Ellis Island without a sponsor, he was about to be shipped back to Europe. But when the word spread that he was an electrical engineer. Westinghouse, picked him up. When a massive new AC-generator failed to function, they called him in. He kicked all the other engineers out while taking making measurements and calculations. They found him next morning, sleeping next to the generator. He gave them instructions to increase the windings of a coil where he had marked with a white chalk. Following his instructions, they saw the generator jump to life. But, when he gave them the bill for $1,000, they challenged him. "Isn't that a bit exorbitant for a chalk mark?" He responded, he was charging $1.00 for the chalk and $999 for pointing out he exact location and the number of turns of wire.

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Thanks for your comments.