Henry's Attic: Some Fascinating Gifts to Henry Ford and His Museum PDF
Preview Henry's Attic: Some Fascinating Gifts to Henry Ford and His Museum
HENDRY'S ATTIC This page intentionally left blank HENRY's ATTIC Some Fascinatineg Gifts to Henry Ford and His Museum By FORD R. BRYAN edited by Sarah Evans Wayne State University Detroit Published 2006 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. © Wayne State University Press. Originally published 1995 by Ford Books. © 1995 by Ford R Bryan. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced wthout formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America. 10 09 7 6 54 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bryan, Ford R. (Ford Richardson) Henry's attic : some fascinating gifts to Henry Ford and his museum / by Ford R. Bryan ; edited by Sarah Evans. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-8143-2642-0 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village. 2. Ford, Henry, 1863-1947—Museums—Michigan—Dearborn. 3. Technology— United States—History. 4. Americana—Private collections— Michigan—Dearborn. 5. Inventions—Private collections— Michigan—Dearborn. I. Evans, Sarah. II. Title. T180.D4H463 2006 607'.3477433-dc22 2006001978 Book design by Mary Primeau Cover photos courtesy of Henry Ford Museum & Greenfield Village and Ford R Bryan This book is dedicated to my grandfather, Charles W. Richardson, who did his best to teach American history to Henry Ford at age fifteen in the sixth grade at the Scotch Settlement School during the school year 1878-1879. This page intentionally left blank CONTENTS Preface 9 Acknowledgments 13 1 Gifts to Greenfield Village 17 2 Agricultural Equipment 51 3 Horse-Drawn Vehicles and Cycles 71 4 Automobiles and Trucks 107 5 Touring Vehicles and Highway Icons 143 6 Railroads, Boats, and Aircraft 159 7 Industrial Equipment 199 8 Firearms 231 9 Household Items 246 10 Lighting Devices 287 11 Clocks and Watches 301 12 Musical Instruments and Phonographs 315 13 Photographic Equipment 333 14 Communications Equipment 345 15 Business and Office Equipment 371 16 Documents 389 17 Gifts from Fair Lane and Other Oddities 405 Index 426 This page intentionally left blank PREFACE When Henry and Clara Ford's home was intended to re-create the slow-paced, rural character cleaned out after Clara's death in 1950, it appeared of America before the advent of the automobile. The that the couple had discarded few, if any, of the items adjacent Henry Ford Museum, patterned after they had accumulated since their marriage in 1888. Independence Hall in Philadelphia and spreading over The fifty-six rooms of Fair Lane, as the Fords called 12 acres, houses an enormous number of machines, their residence, were fairly bulging with personal tools, and other artifacts, most dating from the days belongings and memorabilia. Storage rooms were when America was almost completely rural. crammed so full that a team of researchers, exploring Visitors to the site might well ask why Henry the mansion on the off-chance that it might contain Ford, the man who probably did more than any other some of Henry Ford's papers, could only open the individual to foster America's transition from a rural doors and gawk. A bowling alley was completely filled and agrarian nation to an urban and industrial one— with rolled carpets; another room, with candelabra; and who prospered mightily in the process—would another, with old drapes. Before they were finished, want to enshrine and glorify the past in this way. One the researchers had turned a large indoor swimming possible answer to this question is that Henry came to pool into a two-story document file that contained abhor the kind of world his motor cars had helped seemingly every piece of paper that had ever passed create. To him, the modern metropolis was a "pestif- through the Fords' hands. Dating from the 1890s and erous growth" where people led "unnatural," "cooped- early 1900s were a myriad of rent receipts, grocery up," and "twisted" lives; the old farms of the country- bills, letters, little Edsel's Christmas notes to Santa— side, on the other hand, were in his view places of even ticket stubs and a newspaper boy's receipt for wholesomeness, of "independence" and "sterling forty-five cents. Among the Fords' welter of three- honesty." dimensional memorabilia were such curiosities as a Born on a Dearborn farm in 1863, the future denture that had once adorned the mouth of Thomas motor mogul was to remain a farm boy at heart long Edison, a small cigar that the Queen Mother of Siam after he left his father's homestead for an apprentice- had lit for Clara and from which Clara had taken three ship in a Detroit machine shop at age sixteen. Until puffs, and a cardboard box containing, among other his death in 1947, he was ever an advocate of the mysterious things, an opium pipe and five marijuana puritan morality and simple, homely virtues extolled cigarettes. in the McGuffey Readers on which he and many other An innate tendency to collect and save may children of his generation were raised. These texts in part explain the Fords' accumulation of goods at were the standard fare in the one-room schoolhouses Fair Lane, but the "pack-rat" theory is hardly suffi- Henry attended from ages seven to fifteen. A few cient to account for another part of "Henry's attic": months after completing sixth grade, he left the farm the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village, for the city, and that, with the exception of a brief which Ford established in his hometown of Dearborn, stint at a Detroit commercial college, was to be the Michigan, in the late 1920s. The 240-acre village, now extent of his formal schooling. a collection of about one hundred historic structures The Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield that came to Dearborn from all over the nation and Village were just one manifestation of Henry's efforts from as far away as the Cotswolds in England, is to resurrect and preserve the past, to promote the 9
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