October 2, 2015. Greenfield Village and The Ford Museum.

 

 

 

October 2, 2015.  Greenfield Village and The Ford Museum.  If you are in the Detroit area and you have an extra 5-6 hours, go to The Ford Museum and Greenfield Village.  The museum is filled with vintage cars, airplanes, locomotives and a tribute to the Civil Rights Movement, including the Birmingham bus upon which Rosa Parks defied the local ordinance requiring Black Americans to sit in the back of the bus.  The Village displays 300 years of Americana, including the Ford home, Thomas Edison's lab, a Robert Frost home, the first Ford factory, the Wright Brother's home and bicycle shop, the Henry Firestone home and many other attractions. 

 

Among the pictures shown above is Annie sitting in the Rosa Parks seat on the Birmingham bus, a bicycle built by Orville and Wilbur Wright, the Kennedy Presidential Limousine used on November 22, 1963 in Dallas, a 1927 tent camper, a 1965 Ford Mustang and the original Ford family home. 

 

We toured the Village first, then the Museum.  We spent about five and one-half hours at both facilities.  I don't know how you'd be able to see two-thirds of the features in less time.  We fairly rushed through because we wanted to be on the road by 3:00 PM to avoid most of the rush hour traffic.  We barely made it.  We encountered about ten miles of stop-and-go traffic, but we missed most of it. 

 

Detroit has suffered because of the auto recession of 2008 and afterwards.  The city has filed bankruptcy and lost half it's population.  A large part of the city is blighted and road repairs have been postponed indefinitely.  Detroit is a city in extremis. 

 

But, the Ford legacy remains.  Henry Ford was a complex man who was a pacifist at heart, but who nevertheless helped the WWII war effort by building bombers at an astounding rate from 1943 through the end of the war.  He was a fervent anti-Semitic who left billions to the Ford Foundation for the betterment of mankind.  He was a brilliant industrialist who lacked even a basic social and historical education.  He was the first industrialist to pay his workers a lavish wage of five dollars per day and who later bitterly opposed unionization. 

 

Today has been a good day.  We are in a KOA campground tonight just outside Port Huron.  The campground is filled to overflowing with families here to celebrate Halloween early.  There will be a trick-or-treat session for kids tomorrow at 3:00 PM.  We will be gone by then, but I'll try to photograph some of the decorations before we leave. 

 

Tomorrow will be another good day.  I don't know what form it will take.  But, any day on the road is a good day.  Good night.