Escapees July-August 2024

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The Henry Ford Museum andGreen fi eld Village in Dearborn, Michigan 20900 Oakwood Boulevard, Dearborn, MI 48124, 313-982-6001, www.thehenryford.org & visitdetroit.com

ton, Michigan, a stagecoach inn where he and his wife, Clara, had once attended old-fashioned dances. Fast forward a century. Ford’s dream of preserving Americana, objects and buildings, is being enjoyed by thousands of visitors every day; all being invited to travel to another time. The Henry Ford Museum Architect Robert O. Derrick designed the museum with a 523,000-square-feet exhibit hall that extends 400 feet behind the main façade. The façade spans 800 feet and incorporates facsimiles of three Philadelphia icons: Old City Hall, Independence Hall and Congress Hall. When I arrived, I mapped out what I wanted to see and the “With Liberty and Justice for All” exhibit was my fi rst stop. This exhibit focuses on four critical transformative moments in the American quest for freedom: the Revolutionary Era, the Antislavery Movement and Civil War Era, the Woman’s Suffrage Movement and the Civil Rights Movement. Not only is the message important, but the exhibits are extraordinary and include iconic objects, such as a banner carried in rallies and marches by members of the New York State Woman Suffrage Party, the same bus Rosa Parks was riding on when she refused to give up her seat, leading to the Montgomery bus boycott, George Washington’s camp cot, and the rocking chair Abraham Lincoln was sitting in when he was shot at Ford’s Theatre. This exhibit is central in the building, so from there, I headed for Heroes of the Sky, featuring the men, women and aircraft of the 20th century. Displays include a copy of the 1903 Wright Flyer. This aircraft attempted to duplicate the Wright brothers’ fi rst fl ight at Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina, precisely one hundred years after that historic success on December 17, 2003. Another airplane on display is the Fokker F.VII Tri-Mo tor, that explorer Richard Byrd and pilot Floyd Bennett fl ew toward the North Pole on May 9, 1926. Richard Byrd’s Ford Tri-Motor that he used for his attempt to be the fi rst person to fl y over the South Pole is also here. On November 28–29, 1929, Byrd and a crew of three achieved that goal in this plane.

I am collecting the history of our people as written into things their hands made and used. When we are through, we shall have reproduced American life as lived, and that, I think, is the best way of preserving at least a part of our history and tradition.— Henry Ford I am excited to return to the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation and to Green fi eld Village in Dearborn, Michigan. I last visited decades ago, and my recollections of the remarkable collections drew me back to this Greater Detroit icon. Henry Ford was a collector. His collections included ordinary objects, items connected with his heroes and from his past and examples of industrial progress. It began in 1914 when he wanted to fi ndaspeci fi c McGuffy Reader to verify a long-remembered verse from one of his old, grade-school recitations. Soon he started to collect watches and clocks. The obsession with collecting and preserving the past gained a real foothold when, in 1919, he learned that his birthplace was at risk because of a road improvement project. He moved the farmhouse and had it restored to how he remembered it at the time of his mother’s death, in 1876, when he was 13. He added his old one-room school, Scotch Settlement School, plus the 1686 Wayside Inn in South Sudbury, Massachusetts, and the 1836 Botsford Inn in Farming “From the 1865 Roper, the oldest surviving American car, and Henry Ford’s fi rst gas powered vehicle, to the hybrid 2002 Prius, the exhibit tells how automotive innovations have changed our lives and in fl uenced American culture.”

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ESCAPEES Magazine July/August 2024