A Belated Visit (Lots of Visits, Really) to the Henry Ford near Detroit, MI

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travel dates: July, 2021

Flashback! November, 2019. It is Black Friday. I get the brilliant idea that maybe there are some good deals out there that we can use on our summer, 2020 trip to Michigan. I do some sleuthing and find a great sale on memberships to the Henry Ford museum in Dearborn, Michigan! Woot! With our big family, getting a membership is generally cheaper than paying for two days’ admission, and we were planning on spending two full days at the Henry Ford, so…no brainer! I congratulated myself on my foresight and thrift.

Flashback again! March, 2020. Probably you all remember March, 2020. I guess it wasn’t March when we made the final decision to pull the plug on our summer trip, but it was sometime that spring, and it was very sad. Also it rendered our shiny new (and unused) Henry Ford membership useless. We didn’t know yet what our summer 2021 plans would end up being, but Dave called the Henry Ford and asked if they could put our membership on hold for us, which they very graciously did. And we crossed our fingers that we’d be able to make it there eventually.

Our 2021 trip ended up being mostly a New England trip, but, mostly because of that membership, we decided Michigan wasn’t so far from Vermont, and we might as well just swing by “on our way home” to see Detroit. And so we did.

And we used the crap out of that membership! I think we visited no less than four separate times (not always for a full day) during our week in the Detroit area. (You can also read about where we stayed and the other stuff we did. Or listen to me talk about it on the RV Atlas podcast).

So what exactly is the Henry Ford? Well, it’s a very earnest museum about “American innovation” of course. Which encompasses an enormous variety of objects and exhibits: trains, planes, automobiles (naturally), Rosa Parks’ bus, the chair Lincoln was sitting in when he was assassinated, clocks, furniture, etc. etc. and more etc. It’s a huge, sprawling space that it would take days to explore thoroughly. The museum complex also includes a Ford factory tour, and Greenfield Village–where buildings from a bunch of different times and places have been brought to the site and reassembled to create an expansive “village” that you can tour on foot, by train, or in an authentic Model T:

If you don’t have a fancy membership like we did, admission is $30 for adults and $22.50 for kids up to 11 at Greenfield Village and $27/20.25 to the museum. Of course, this makes for a pretty expensive experience if you want to see both (add another $22 for the factory tour and $10 for the “giant screen experience” plus $9 for parking), so even without a Black Friday deal, it’s worth doing the math and seeing if a membership makes more sense. A family membership is $185 and includes the village, museum, giant screen experience, and parking. So if you have a family of four and want to do the museum one day and village another, you’ll save money by buying a membership.

You don’t necessarily need to come back four times like we did, but I would definitely allocate two full days if you want to see most of the museum and village.

A few other practical considerations:

*There’s plenty of food available onsite, from general theme park type fare to more thematically thoughtful places like the Eagle Tavern in the Village.

*There are a number of rides in the Village (the Model Ts, the train, horse-drawn carriages, and a carousel). You can add a ride pass onto your membership, but it’s fairly pricey. But then, the rides are fairly pricey, too. We ended up only doing the Model T ride, as it seemed the most iconic and essential.

*The complex is huge, so be prepared for tons of walking. There’s plenty of parking, but much of it is a long walk to the entrance, and then there’s just getting started walking.

*One of my favorite things about midwest vacations is how tourist attractions often have these Mold-a-rama machines. The machines make site-specific plastic models for you while you watch, which make for fun and inexpensive souvenirs.

*The Giant Screen Experience was included with our membership, so we went to one show, but it was not our favorite thing. It was fine. Definitely skippable if you’re short on time or if you’d have to pay for a separate ticket. It was some nature documentary that was, as are all nature documentaries in These Troubled Times pretty heavy on catastrophic climate change stuff. They do also show regular movies sometimes at night–I think they were showing Labyrinth when we were there as a tie in with the Jim Henson exhibit, and we were tempted, but it was too late at night for Abe.

I won’t give an exhaustive run down of everything we did, but here are a few of the highlights:

Museum of American Innovation

Naturally, we really enjoyed the exhibit tracing the history of road trips in America, including the vehicles people used for such trips and the places they stayed, among other things. I’m a sucker for a fake hotel room!

And of course, we always enjoy seeing old RVs

The bus where Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott, is one of the museum’s biggest attractions.

Of course, Rosa Parks’s story is compelling, and walking on the actual bus is a moving experience…but I’m also fascinated by the story of how the bus was found and restored and how it ended up at the Henry Ford (this is perhaps in keeping with my navel gazing about the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis and my ongoing mediation on What Are Museums For?) It’s worth spending a little time reading up on all that before seeing the bus itself.

And there it is! The chair Lincoln was sitting in when he was shot! Honestly, it’s a little odd, and I’m not sure why Ford’s Theatre (also called Ford!) doesn’t have this instead.

We really liked this Airstream looking Dymaxian house–the only remaining prototype of this “house of the future.” There were supposed to be tons of them, but the idea didn’t take off. I think you used to be able to go inside, but all the traffic proved too hard on the little house, so now you must content yourself with peering through windows.

We found the Mathematica exhibit relevant to our interests in a few ways. For one thing, it fits in with my interest in museums as a concept; the exhibit was originally designed by Ray and Charles Eames in 1961 for the California Museum of Science and Industry, but since then the original exhibit has moved around, and duplicates have been built and moved around as well. So the exhibit is all about math and has a nice, retro, mid-century vibe. We count a math major and a math teacher and a kid who just likes math a lot amongst our number, so we’re always up for a good math exhibit.

But Dave and I also have a more nostalgic connection with Mathematica, as one of the other duplicates is at the Museum of Science in Boston, where Dave used to work, and where I spent an awful lot of time with baby Ari back when we lived in Boston. You can read the whole history over on Wikipedia if you care to.

This Jim Henson exhibition was a traveling exhibit that’s no longer around (looks like it’s at the Grand Rapids Public Museum as I’m writing this), but I didn’t want to pass up a chance to post pictures of Muppets. We made Ari pose with the Count because they both like math.

And, of course, there are plenty of cars. So many cars! Even though I have a mess of boys, I don’t really have any that are particularly big fans of cars, so we didn’t spend as much time in the car sections as in others:

If you’re wondering, “does the museum do much to address the darker parts of Henry Ford’s legacy, like, for example, his notorious anti-semitism?”…the answer is no. At least not that we saw. The museum isn’t really about Henry Ford, though–it’s about Henry Ford’s very rose-colored vision of America. So don’t expect a lot of grappling with complex issues. The museum does address stuff like civil rights and women’s rights, but always with a focus on progress in those areas. I’m not sure how they fit Abe Lincoln’s chair into that.

Greenfield Village

Honestly, I was more excited about Greenfield Village than about the museum. It seemed like the ultimate prize for a living history aficionado such as myself. It’s an enormous collection of historic buildings, divided into seven themed (albeit sometimes loosely) “historic districts” like Main Street, Porches and Parlors, and Working Farms.

At most living history museums, you’re exploring a particular place at a particular time: maybe Williamsburg, VA in the pre-revolutionary period to pick a well-known example. But the only thing uniting the buildings at Greenfield Village seems to be that someone thought they were cool and the museum was able to acquire them.

So you can explore the Wright Brothers’ bicycle shop and Thomas Edison’s workshop (both of which, of course, do fit in well with that whole American innovation theme), but then you can turn a corner and see a Cotswold Cottage from 17th century England.

Watching a baseball game played with 1867 rules was probably our very favorite thing in all of the Henry Ford. We’d been looking forward to it for YEARS, what with the rescheduling of the trip and all, and we made sure to time our visit so we could see a game (they happen on weekends in summer). First the players all assemble in front of the Town Hall (and you’re welcome to chat with them and ask all your old-timey baseball questions), and then the mayor (who if I remember right was also the announcer and the umpire on this particular day) makes a little speech before everyone walks over to the ballfield, accompanied by a brass band:

And then there’s an entire baseball game. We watched the Lah-de-dahs battle it out against the Nationals, but teams from all over the midwest come to play on different weekends. In 1867, there were no gloves, no stolen bases, and play had to stop whenever the train went through the outfield (“three cheers for the Iron Horse!”)

They take a decidedly superior attitude toward old-timey baseball at Greenfield Village, with lots of looking down their noses at modern baseball, played for money –so distasteful! Which is sort of interesting, given the celebration of capitalism and technology and “progress” going on everywhere else at the Henry Ford

So that’s my number one recommendation for Greenfield Village: make it to a game if you can! It was so fun to watch (and also nice to have an excuse to sit still for a little while after so much walking in the very hot weather).

We didn’t do it this way, but I suggest starting your visit with a ride in a Model T; they go all over the village as your driver points out various highlights, so it’s a great way to get an overview and figure out what you want to prioritize seeing on foot later. I also suggest getting there early, as the lines get very long as the day goes on. There is an extra charge for the Model T rides, but I can’t easily find what it is on the website. I want to say somewhere in the $5 per person range. This was the only ride we paid extra for, reasoning that we could ride a train in all sorts of places but would rarely get a chance to ride in an authentic Model T

Greenfield Village really is just a fascinating endeavor. I mean–a complete replica (I believe this one is a replica and not the actual building moved like many of them) of Thomas Edison’s workshop?

I had been hoping for more shows and presentations at Greenfield Village than what we found. I feel like when I looked at the website before our covid-canceled trip, I found a much fuller schedule, so perhaps there’s usually more and we hit it on a bad year due to pandemics and staffing and whatnot. A lot of the buildings were unstaffed entirely and in others there would be someone there giving a fairly dry history of whatever the building was. I was hoping for something a little more engaging for the kids, with reenactments, activities, etc.

We did find more of that in a few spots, though, like the Daggett Farmhouse: