The Wright Brothers’ Flying House

File this one under things you can do when you’re rich: buy famous people’s houses, dismantle them, and cart them off to Dearborn, Michigan, to be reassembled as part of an outdoor museum full of famous people’s houses, which is complemented by an indoor museum full of planes, trains, and automobiles. This is, of course, exactly what Henry Ford did with some of his prodigious wealth, opening what is now known as the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation and Greenfield Village. I visited with my family during the week I moved to Ann Arbor with my carload of books and dishes, Hezekiah, and my bike.

We started outside with Greenfield Village and saw a sawmill, weaving, a printing shop, a tinsmith, and a pottery shop. At the tin shop, we saw a cookie cutter being made, at the weaving shop there were workers operating the hand looms, and at the printer’s, there was the opportunity to operate the printing press. This part was similar to Sturbridge Village or Plimoth Plantation, both perennial field trip destinations for New England schoolchildren. Next, we moved to the Main Street area, which contains the majority of the transported buildings. Here we saw a millinery, a jewelry store, the Wright brothers’ workshop and house, and the post office, among other anachronistically placed structures. You can send actual postcards from the post office that have their own special postmark.

One of the mills

Later in the day, we ended our evening back in Greenfield Village walking through various homes. Regretfully, we didn’t have enough time to spend time admiring every building, but it was a unique experience. I mean, how else would you ever be able to walk from Thomas Edison’s grandparents’ house to the courthouse where Lincoln once tried cases in fifteen minutes? Overall, I found that the historical presenters were willing and happy to answer any questions, which was a welcome change from art museum docents/security whose main job seems to be yelling at people for using flash photography/taking any pictures at all/getting too near to the art/scaring the paintings by breathing too loudly.

We spent the middle part of the day indoors in the Henry Ford Museum looking at dozens of cars, trains, and any other thing Henry Ford thought would be cool to put in a museum. Highlights include a snowplow train, an(other) entire house, the bus Rosa Parks rode, and a tomato harvester. The house is the Dymaxion house, designed by R. Buckminster Fuller as a cost-effective house of the future. He designed the house to be easily transported and assembled and to be resource-efficient, but the idea never caught on. Fuller has ties to another museum I’ve been to – the Biosphere in Montreal. The building is surrounded by a geodesic dome of which Fuller was the architect. Inside, the museum focuses on the environment, and if they haven’t changed it too much since I went, it’s worth a visit.

A neon Holiday Inn sign.  Because why wouldn't you think
"I should buy this," when you see one?

Two more things you can do at the museum: eat and watch films. We had lunch at the café inside the museum. The prices are pretty reasonable, especially for museum food. It’s not cheap, but the portions are decent and the food’s good. Lastly, they show documentary-type films throughout the day. We saw one on national parks, which we mainly just watched to see scenic shots of nature, and one on transportation, focusing on planes. There were some interesting points in that one, about globalization, and just how quickly things can move now. That movie was the last thing we did at the museum; we returned to Ann Arbor after that for dinner. It was a very long, full, and varied day that I thoroughly enjoyed, and I would highly recommend the Ford Museum.

To conclude, if you’re ever in the southeastern corner of Michigan, pay the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village a visit. You can easily spend a couple days wandering around, because you really can’t go wrong when the theme of the museum is “cool stuff Henry Ford decided he should buy and haul to Dearborn.”