Yesterday all of us visited the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, MI. Dearborn is western suburb of Detroit and we came from the Northeast all the way across the city. I was glad we had a GPS to guide us. There were many turns and the traffic was very busy and fast. The museum is part of a complex called Greenfield Village. The museum has an Imax theater as well as exhibits and the village has Thomas Edison's Menlo Park lab and the Wright Brothers bicycle shop among other feaures. It also must have a steam powered train as we kept hearing the loud whistle all the time we were outside. You can also get a bus ride to a tour of the Rouge Truck Plant where you can see the whole auto manufacturing process in action, depending on production schedules.
Right off, let me say that this is a first-rate, Smithsonian class museum. The exhibits are extremely well done. Some of the topics are exhaustively covered and others are shorter but all are done well. We elected to visit just the museum and let the village go for another day. The museum itself will wear you out. We were there fours hours and we were all just beat by the time we left. We hurried through a lot of it but you keep telling yourself that you need to see it all. Really, to fully appreciate what is shown you need to do it over several visits so you can read all the signs and get the full picture. Of course, most of us just try to cram it all in.
The museum is heavy in transportation themes but also has exhibits of jewelry and clocks and a good one on the timeline of the development of the country from the Declaration of Independence up through the Civil Rights struggle. For example, they have the bus that Rosa Parks boarded.
When you come in the main museum entrance you find yourself staring up at this DC-3.
They must have had quite a time getting that one in here and mounted. They have an interesting set of exhibits of aircraft and their place in history without trying to cover the whole range. For that you should visit the Air Force Air Museum in Dayton, Ohio.
They had a good Wright Flyer.
And they had a good exhibit of the barnstormer era.
Like any good museum they had a variety of interactive activities and displays. With the barnstormers you could stand on a biplane wing and watch a projection of what the wing walker would see. Good if you have a strong stomach. And then they also had a station with materials and instructions for folding a paper airplane and then a range to test it out on. There were also some dioramas such as this one depicting the Ford Trimotor Transport.
One end of the museum is given over to a display of rail transportation from the early carriages to the largest steam locomotive ever produced, the Allegheny Locomotive. This engine is just staggering in its size, even bigger than the "Big Boy" locomotives. They could haul a line of 160 cars loaded with coal or reach speeds of 60 mph.
Perhaps a quarter of the display space of the museum is devoted to automobiles, from the earliest to the latest. One interesting display is that of the various presidential limousines.
As you would expect, the display of automotive technology is definitive, containing all brands and technologies. It was also quite varied and had some early RV related exhibits as well.
I was pleased to find this display of the GMC unit that Charles Kurault used while producing his "On The Road" series.
One of the aspects of the museum that I particularly enjoyed was that while the various display contained the details of the item, they also gave the historical context of the item so you could see its' importance and why it might be displayed.
To extend the atmosphere of the transportation section, they had displays of classic advertising, including a McDonald's sign. Just to the rear was Lamy's Diner where we stopped to eat lunch.
They also had another lunch related icon.
One section was entitled Made In America and had displays of everything from automobiles to light bulbs to Eames chairs.
As a woodworker, I was interested to see the inclusion of this bandsaw and early planer.
The display extended to furniture and even cast iron stoves.
Another section of the Made In America display dealt with power, most specifically the development of the power generation that made manufacturing possible. It started with the invention of the steam engine to pump water out of coal mines in England and then progressed to the perfection of steam engines which allowed them to be efficient sources of the energy needed to run factories. I've never seen such a display of stationery engines, even at the Smithsonian. And they are huge. And there's lots of them. Some are so large that the building was designed around them. The largest is the last of the monsters that powered the Highland plant that made the model T's. It was so big that I couldn't get a meaningful picture of it. But here are some of the smaller ones.
There were other sections, too. One on agriculture with various tractors and other machines.
This is really an outstanding museum and a definite must-see if you can make it to this part of the country. It's going to take two days to see it, especially if you attend the Imax theater. There's quite a lot of parking and even a lot for RVs and other large vehicles. They have special displays throughout the year. One on the Titanic was just wrapping up this week. It cost $10 extra and was just more than we wanted to do. I'm really glad we had the opportunity to include this in our trip.
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