Detroit and Dearborn, Michigan

Note:  This is a "blast from the past" post as we work our way backwards to catch you up on our previous destinations. We recently hit the road again and are working our way toward Denver by way of Las Vegas, Phoenix, and New Mexico. We will not be doing any "real time" posts until early March when we visit Kansas. Kansas will be the first of 19 new states that we will visit this year in the final leg of our adventure. 

Visited July 31 - Aug 2, 2020

By Marty

Our visit to the Detroit area was a short one, just three nights.  Candidly, our interest in exploring Detroit was not that great but we did want to see The Henry Ford in Dearborn, Michigan which consists of two museums: The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation and Greenfield Village. Our brother-in-law Chris spent his career in the auto industry and made numerous business trips to Detroit. Chris highly recommended these two museums to us.

 

Our RV park was about an hour northeast of Dearborn on Lake St. Clair. The USA/Canada border runs down the middle of Lake St. Clair.  This lake drains south into the Detroit River (which is only 28 miles long) which then drains into Lake Erie.

The is the edge of our RV park on Lake St. Clair. Notice how high the water level is. We've observed this in each of the Great Lakes visited thus far, which are experiencing record high water levels in 2020.

We went to a nearby BBQ restaurant for dinner the night of our arrival. The COVID procedures in place were quite well thought out and communicated. This sign was in front of each parking space at the restaurant. Keep in mind that this is late July, 2020, just a few months into COVID 19.  These guys were ahead of their time in making the best of a really difficult situation.

 The Henry Ford

 

From the web:

 

The Henry Ford (which includes the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation, Greenfield Village, and the Edison Institute) was named for it's founder and based on Ford's efforts to preserve items of historical interest and portray the Industrial Revolution. The property houses homes, machinery, exhibits, and Americana of historically significant items as well as common memorabilia, both of which help to capture the history of life in early America. By the late 1920's, Henry Ford had become the primary collector of Americana in the world.  

Henry Ford had enjoyed collecting “relics”—as he called them—for over a decade before he founded his museum and village. His passion for collecting spanned three decades.

 Henry Ford said of his museum:

"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 ..."

 

 For more info on the museum's history and mission:

The Henry Ford: History and Mission

 

 

 

 

 

Greenfield Village consists of  nearly 90 buildings acquired by Ford and relocated to the the 300 acre Village. Virtually all of these historically significant structures were disassembled, brick by brick or board by board, and moved to this site. The structures include:

- Sir John Bennett Clock Tower (above), a watch and jewelry store in London, England, which originally stood five stories tall. Ford, a watch enthusiast, purchased the building in 1928 and had it reassembled in a two story scale, making it compatible with the other buildings in the Village.

- Wright Cycle Shop and Wright Home: Wilbur and Orville Wright were born in Dayton, Ohio where they operated their bicycle business from 1897 to 1908. It was in this shop that the Wright brothers built their earliest flying machines.

- Harvey Firestone (tire maker) farmhouse, barn, pump house, and chicken shed.

- Replicas of Thomas Edison's Menlo Park, NJ, laboratory, machine shop, library, carpentry shop, and carbon shed.  The Edison institute also includes Edison's original Glass House and his Fort Meyers, FL laboratory.

Check out this video:     How Greenfield Village Relocated Historic Buildings

Iconic inventors Henry Ford and Thomas Edison met in 1896 and later became best friends. Ford acquired his winter cottage, "The Mangoes" next door to Edison's "Seminole Lodge" in Fort Meyers, FL.

Heinz House: Henry J. Heinz began his successful business by bottling horseradish in the basement of his parents' home in Sharpsburg, PA. From this house he sold a growing variety of pickles and relishes to neighbors before moving his operation to Pittsburgh.

Scotch Settlement School 

Henry Ford attended this one-room schoolhouse from age seven to ten. Because of Ford's fondness for his teacher John Chapman, he not only followed Chapman to Miller School but also brought the school and Chapman's house to Greenfield Village. This school, originally built in 1861 in Dearborn Township, was the first classroom of the Greenfield Village school system Henry Ford started in 1929.

This wasp nest, the size of a soccer ball, was hanging in a tree above our heads on the sidewalk.

The photos below are from the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation

 

 

 

 

 

 

  Inside the restroom

 

A replica of the Wright Flyer flown by Orville Wright at Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina on December 17, 1903.

The chair in which Abraham Lincoln was sitting at Ford's Theater when he was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth on April 14, 1865.

The bus in which Rosa Parks was riding when she refused to give up her seat to a white man in Montgomery, AL on December 1, 1955.

This is not a Model T marionette.  It is an exploded view of a 1924 Ford Model T touring car.

An interesting piece of industrial age machinery, explained below.

Did you ever wish you were an Oscar Mayer wiener?  Neither did I. That sounds disgusting.

Good luck getting the jingle out of your head after watching this:

Oscar Mayer Wiener 1965 Commercial

Inside a different restroom

The limousine, a 1961 Lincoln Continental, in which President Kennedy was riding in Dallas when assassinated on November 22, 1963.

 

Both museums were quite interesting, though we feel that we didn't do justice to them. We spent the morning touring Greenfield Village and the afternoon in the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation. In hindsight I would advise spreading the visit over two days and spend 5-6 hours in each museum. There is just too much interesting information to absorb in one day.

After touring the museums we drove to downtown Detroit and walked around a bit. Above is the Renaissance Center, which includes the headquarters for General Motors and the tallest building in Michigan at 70 stories.

Directly across the Detroit River is Windsor, Canada... eh?  Our itinerary called for us to travel next to Toronto and then to Niagara Falls on the Canadian side. But the pandemic put the kibosh on that idea. The Canada/USA border is closed. From Detroit we will make the 410 mile drive to Niagara Falls on the USA side.