After leaving Toronto, we met Lauren and Daren at the Henry Ford Museum, in Dearborn, MI, on the way to their house in Canton. On such a nice day we chose to stay outside and tour Greenfield Village. The village is a large collection of houses and buildings that Ford collected because of their historical interest. Noah Webster’s home from Connecticut, Booker T. Washington boyhood cabin, the Wright Brothers bicycle shop, Robert Frost’s retreat, the Edison lab and machine shop, train stations, Model T garages, slave quarters from a Georgia Plantation, an early carousel, and many others, all were disassembled, loaded onto train cars and brought to Dearborn by Ford to be part of his living history site, which opened to much fanfare in 1929.

Ford in many of his activities was influenced by the work of the industrial engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor who conducted some of the early studies on manufacturing processes (so-called, scientific management). It was Taylor’s belief that there is only one “right way” to do anything. Ford transformed the automobile industry with his applications of these views, and in Greenfield Village, one can see him similarly at work with the way that history should be taught.

Since Lauren was on midsemester break, we used the opportunity while at her house to completely unload the car and sort through all of our gear and stuff, shipping a box home, drying out the damp tent, and generally getting ready for the next phase of our journey.