At The Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village

I have not played much golf this past week because I’ve been at The Henry Ford for a weeklong workshop on the Industrial Revolution via a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Here’s a photo of a live demonstration of an early mechanical reaper.

The Henry Ford, located in Dearborn, Michigan, is an indoor and outdoor museum and living history site dedicated to American ideas and innovations. It started as Henry Ford’s personal collection, and has grown to become a facility of amazing scope. In addition to typical indoor museum stuff, the adjacent Greenfield Village complex has many historic buildings that Ford bought and moved piece-by-piece to Michigan, including the Wright Brothers home and workshop, parts of Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park complex, and the home of Noah Webster, Luther Burbank, Robert Frost, H.J. Heinz, as well as the original Ford “factory.”

In addition, Greenfield Village serves as a living museum, where traditional crafts and skills are practiced every day. The workers at the Harvey Firestone farmhouse (moved from Ohio) grow food in the traditional way, with heirloom seeds and heritage livestock breeds and prepare and eat the fruits of their labors (photo above).

At the engine house, they maintain the skills needed to maintain the now all-but-extinct steam engine.

t the Daggett farmhouse, colonial era skills are practiced and preserved, again with period tools, seeds and livestock.

The GolfBlogger family has had a family membership for years and even with an additional week of intensive study, I feel as though I have not even scratched the surface of what The Henry Ford has to offer.