T H E   H I S T O R I E S   O F   T H E

A NATIONAL TREASURE ON THE U-M DEARBORN CAMPUS

By Doug Moffat

Few sites on the University of campus, or any other university or college campus in this country, can inspire the range of feeling people experience when visiting the Henry Ford Estate at U-M Dearborn. Amongst all the formidable men who put their mark on industry and the country in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Henry Ford most endures for us as a person. Fair Lane, his home during the years when his power was at its zenith is, therefore, a place of great fascination.

Ford embodied fundamental tensions that we still wrestle with as a society and as individuals. He loved nature deeply but also championed mass production of the automobile, which has transformed our relationship with nature and, some would argue, has destroyed it. He believed in the goodness of old-fashioned, robust physical labor but was also in the vanguard of technological change and the development of the production line that depersonalized labor for millions of factory workers in a worldwide industrial process historians now call "Fordism." He valued simple utility but maneuvered successfully in a complex world of vast business interests and political influence. He was fabulously wealthy yet deeply suspicious of the traditional institutions associated with wealth. In many ways the Henry Ford Estate reflects the contradictory passions of the man who built it.

Henry and Clara Ford began planning their country home in 1909. They wanted to remove themselves from the bustle of Detroit and chose to relocate in Dearborn, a few miles from where Henry grew up. Construction began in 1914 and was completed by the end of die following year. The Fords lived there for the rest of their lives; Henry died in 1947 and Clara in 1950. After Clara's death the couple's grandchildren auctioned off the furnishings of the Ford mansion and, in 1952, sold the estate to the Ford Motor Company. For five years the mansion served as the company's corporate archives. In 1957, however, it donated the buildings on the Estate, some 200 of the original 1,300 acres, and $6 million to the University of Michigan to serve as the site of the Dearborn campus.

Today the Henry Ford Estate is located on the western edge of the U-M Dearborn on 72 acres of land. The Estate is open to visitors year round, and it would be difficult to imagine any such visitors leaving without a complicated combination of impressions to do with wealth, nature and utility. To some extent these impressions result from the confused architectural history of the mansion itself. (more)

---

This issue's index             |              This Issue's Front Page