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 Author
Bill Bryson sums up the Henry Ford Museum, "you find
yourself in a great hangar of a building covering twelve
acres of ground and filled with the most indescribable
assortment of stuff...This was the way the Smithsonian once
was and still should be - a cross between an attic and a
junk shop." Henry Ford first started collecting historical
objects in 1906. This collection was meant to document the
genius of ordinary people by preserving the objects they
used in the course of their everyday lives. His desire to
share these with the public soon led to the completion of
the Henry Ford Museum in 1929. Henry Ford's museum allowed
him to collect "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..."
The Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village, also known as
the Edison Institute, is located in Dearborn and is
America's first and largest indoor-outdoor museum. It charts
the country's evolution from a rural to an industrial
society through exhibits covering communications,
transportation, domestic life, agriculture, and industry.
The museum's intent is to show how Americans lived and
worked since the founding of the country.
 Greenfield
Village is the largest outdoor museum in the United States.
With nearly one hundred historical buildings, Greenfield
Village is also known as a "museum of buildings". The
buildings in the village were chosen to reflect Henry Ford's
view of what was important in history. The Village includes
buildings from the 17th century to the present (the actual
buildings - most were moved there!). They range from the
laboratory of Thomas Edison, to Noah Webster's house, and
even all the way back to a British stone house.
Top things to visit at The Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield
Village:
The Henry Ford Museum
The nuclear-powered Ford Nucleon automobile.
The Oscar Mayer Wienermobile.
President Kennedy's Death Car, a 1961 Lincoln Continental.
The rocking chair from Ford's Theater in which President
Abraham Lincoln was shot.
George Washington's camp bed.
Thomas Edison's alleged last breath in a sealed tube.
Buckminster Fuller's prototype Dymaxion house.
The bus Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on.
Igor Sikorsky's prototype helicopter.
Fokker Trimotor airplane that flew the first flight over the
North Pole.
Bill Elliott's record-breaking race car clocking in at over
212 MPH.
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