Building America: a trip around the Henry Ford museum

Over time, these made fascinating collections – you’ll see firearms, furniture, oil lamps, farm equipment, locomotives and even buildings – and came to be accompanied by some extraordinary items from history. This you begin to discover when you first walk along the chandelier-bedecked entrance hall, turn right towards the collections and are confronted by a blue-nosed Douglas DC3 airliner hanging from the reinforced roof. 

About 40 per cent of the exhibits feature cars, a minority of which are Fords, although all of the really famous Fords are displayed. The rest of the museum’s remarkable content depicts the progress of society that produced it. Turn left from the DC3 and you’ll walk through extraordinary collections of steam engines and farm equipment, including Fords (the company moved earlier than most to making its ‘Fordson’ tractors). 

Another powerful exhibit that takes as its title a phrase from the US pledge of allegiance – With Liberty and Justice for all – charts the achievements of the civil right movements, featuring as its centrepiece the ‘Rosa Parks bus’, which became a symbol of the struggle when a black female passenger defied the law and refused to give up her seat for a white male. 

Near the dominating DC3 there’s a collection of early aviation artefacts: replicas of the Wright brothers’ Flyer and Charles Lindbergh’s Atlantic-crossing Ryan monoplane, Ford’s own 1925 Tri-motor airliner and the single-seat Ford Flivver, the ill-fated ‘Model T of the air’ that was supposed to bring cheap flying to the masses but was discontinued when young test pilot Harry J Brooks crashed into the sea on a development flight. 

Leave the aeroplanes and you soon arrive at enormous depictions of Ford’s earliest days: huge photo panels showing hundreds of Model T rolling chassis in one image, all waiting for their engines. There’s lots of newsreel film from that period, made better by the excitable style of the narrators. Just across the aisle, a couple of friendly and knowledgeable museum workers help successions of young visitors assemble a Model T step by step. 

Their best story is the one about how mass production changed car manufacture: a Model T that initially took 12.5 hours to make could later be built in 93 minutes. The consequent efficiency gains allowed Ford both to slash the Model T’s price and more than double his workers’ wages to an unprecedented $5 a day, an income that allowed many of them to become Ford owners.

“Low wages are the most costly an employer can pay,” declared Ford. He was no saint, mind. His opinion of Jews and their effect on business was especially suspect. But his lifelong appreciation of ordinary people was continually backed by action. 

The museum’s car collection is eclectic in the extreme: everything from Henry Ford’s first quadricycle, through the Lincoln in which President Kennedy died to classic caravans and a Lotus-Ford single-seater race car in which Jim Clark won Indianapolis.

Surrounding these are superb examples of the car culture, extravagant neon signs from drive-in restaurants and movies, filling stations, newsreel of cars being torture tested and even a letter from gangster Clyde Barrow (of Bonnie and Clyde fame) congratulating Henry Ford, in a clear and educated hand, for building such a fine vehicle as “the V-8”. 

But its centrepiece is surely a wonderful timeline of car design and engineering that starts with machines from the dawn of motoring in the 1880s and moves gradually to show how they progressed, shaped as much by history as taste. You come to understand in a few yards how the early petrol car gained precedence over electric power and steam.