Henry Ford at the Museum He Created
Standing outside the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation in Dearborn is this larger-than-life statue of Henry Ford, the man whose vision created the remarkable collection housed inside.
Born on a farm near Dearborn in 1863, Ford became one of the most influential industrialists of the twentieth century. He did not invent the automobile, but he transformed how automobiles were manufactured. The Ford Motor Company, founded in 1903, introduced the Model T in 1908, and Ford’s development of moving assembly-line production dramatically reduced the time and cost required to build a car. By making automobiles affordable to millions of Americans, Ford helped change where people lived, how they worked and traveled, and ultimately the physical landscape of the country.
The inscription on the base of the statue identifies him simply by name, while the plaque below records that it was donated by Ford Motor Company and Cynthia and Edsel B. Ford II. Edsel Ford II is Henry Ford’s great-grandson, providing a connection between the monument, the company Ford founded and the family that continued his legacy.
Henry Ford established what was originally called the Edison Institute in 1929. His vision was much larger than creating a museum devoted to automobiles or even to his own accomplishments. For years, Ford had collected machinery, tools, vehicles, household objects and entire historic buildings. He believed people could understand history by seeing the actual things earlier generations had made and used.
That philosophy ultimately produced both the museum and neighboring Greenfield Village. Inside the museum, enormous machines and automobiles stand alongside objects associated with some of the defining moments in American history. Ford was fascinated by invention and industrial progress, but he was equally interested in preserving the material evidence of everyday American life.
The museum opened to the public in 1933 and continued to grow far beyond Ford’s original collection. Before walking through the doors and encountering the automobiles, machinery, inventions and objects that tell so many different American stories, we first encounter Henry Ford: the industrialist, innovator and collector who believed that history should be preserved not only in books, but in the actual objects and places people left behind.
