MIICHIGAN: Greenfield Village

On Saturday we wrapped ourselves up and went down to Dearborn to visit another part of the Henry Ford museum complex known as Greenfield Village. If your familiar with Beamish in the UK it's very similar - an outside open air museum come village put together by Henry Ford [that car dude] with houses and buildings related to his life - childhood home and first Ford building to the complex of Thomas Edison and other prominent Americans. In fact its the largest of such museums in the whole of the USA. There was also stream trains which made the trip in itself worth while. So I thought i'd share with some of the 'statement' buildings from people you know [or should know about].

This building was built at Greenfield Village in 1945 and is a 1/4 size replica of Ford's first factory located on Detroit's Mack Avenue where from 1903 workers began manufacturing some of Ford's earliest vehicles. 

Before they became infamous for their flight trails, the Wright Bros. daily income came from building, selling and the repair of bicycles in Dayton, Ohio their actual shop now sits along Greenfield Village's Main Street next to their home which has additionally been moved there.

Inside the replica [although some of the parts are original] of Thomas Edison's Menlo Park complex you can see were the first light bulb, phonograph and many of his other inventions were created. Apparently Edison challenged himself to making one minor invention every 10 days which he is said to have achieved. 

Inside the Detroit Toledo and Milwaukee Roundhouse which was built in 1984 there's some great stream engines inside [well great to me at least]. They are currently working on Mr Ford's personal train engine and America's oldest scheduled running train [from the 1850's] is currently undergoing it's winter service.

When you think of Mr Heinz, you'll probably think of tomato ketchup but he actually started bottling horseradish which he sold from and made in the basement of this house which moved from Pennsylvania to the village. 

Around Main Street they had some lovely vintage porcelain [well replica] advertisements for everything from soap to sewing threads. There's certainly something much more beautiful to these advertisements then there is to airbrushed women. 

Joe had a lot of fun feeding the sheep that were alongside the replica of Henry Ford's childhood home - they were rather friendly to say the least and I was somewhat envious of that lovely lot of thick wool they had on their backs.

Are you a museum geek like we are?!