Greenfield Village

Cotswold Cottage

We haven’t been to Greenfield Village for quite a few years, yet many of the scenes were familiar. Henry Ford created this park and the nearby Ford Museum in 1929. It opened on the 50^th anniversary of the invention of the light bulb. In the village is a recreation of Edison’s Menlo Park labs. Ford, President Hoover, and Edison were here for the opening of the park by re-enacting the discovery on a radio broadcast to the nation. In most of the buildings were period actors who explained the history or meaning behind the building. Also here is the boarding house that was the first to use electric lights and the bicycle shop where the Wright Brothers worked. Then there are just a variety of homes that were moved here: the Susquehanna plantation house, slave’s quarters, New England homes from the 1700s, and a stone Cotswold Cottage. A highlight was the Noah Webster House, known for the Webster dictionary, Webster actually wrote quite a few spellers and reading books. At the time, most children learned to read from the bible. He was trying to create an American school curriculum and formalize the American Language, removing many of the spelling variants and extra letters of English (colour vs. color, rustick vs. rustic). Just down the road was the McGuffey home and school. We finished the village by visiting the craftworks area: glass blowers, weavers, printers and machine shops.

Noah Webster Dictionary

In the afternoon, we visited part of the Henry Ford Museum.  The presidential vehicles from Roosevelt through Reagan were here, including the Ford Lincoln where Kennedy was assassinated. Nearby was one of the first passenger trains – where the passenger cars look like stage coach wagons. The most interesting part of the museum was the “Heros of the Sky” section with many replicas of planes that set the records – the Wright flyer, the Spirit of St. Louis, the Fokker that Byrd used to fly to the North Pole and planes that set speed records. There was a Sikorsky Helicopter from the late 1930s, which could fly up, down, side to side, and backwards, but it took them an extra year to learn how to fly forward.

Kennedy Limousine

They also have a section on Liberty and Justice for all, which starts with the original ideas that formed the United States, but then goes through Lincoln’s freedom of the slaves through the civil rights movements. Included in the exhibits is the chair from the Ford theater

that Lincoln used and the Rosa Parks bus. There is a lot more to see: cars, railroads, Made in America and furnishings, but we were tired. We concluded our visit seeing the 1952, Oscar Mayer Weiner Mobile.

1831 DeWitt Rail Cars