Signs remain of Henry and his legacy

The air hangs still in the sunlit office, where a massive grandfather clock keeps companionable silence with a green-veined marble fireplace. Outside, there's a maze of modern cubicles in the former Ford Engineering Laboratories in Dearborn, now the home of powertrain development.

But here, just off the wood-paneled corridor, is Henry Ford's former sanctuary. Historians write that Ford disliked the Schaefer Road headquarters and would make token appearances there, then flee to this office to do serious work and thinking.

On pillar C-10 in the same building, the names of the members of the board of directors are penciled in from Oct. 16, 1938, with marks of their heights, like a mother's jottings on a kitchen door frame. Henry's mark is in the lower third. Upstairs, a massive safe, now unused, once guarded payroll and Ford's blueprints.

The "No smoking" sign at Henry Ford's Piquette Avenue plant in Detroit is a reminder that discipline was rigorous at the birthplace of the Model T. PHOTO: Julie May

It's one of those places where a little shiver touches the back of the neck, one of those spots where modern reality meets nostalgic history. The big estates, Henry and Clara Ford's Fair Lane in Dearborn and the Edsel & Eleanor Ford House on Gaukler Pointe in Grosse Pointe Shores, are almost too public to raise goose bumps of discovery. And The Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village complex, now called The Henry Ford, shows Ford at his most synthesized and sanitized.

The real Ford touch exists in more commonplace, workaday sites. There are many such overlooked spots in and around Detroit and Dearborn. They are places that seem to be waiting for Henry Ford the master mechanic to walk back in.

Grandfather clock sits in Henry Ford's office in the former Ford Engineering Laboratories building in Dearborn. PHOTO: Ford company photo by Sam VanHagen

"You're talking of a guy who never really got the grease out from under his fingernails," says Katherine Clarkson, former executive director of Preservation Wayne.

The nonprofit group is dedicated to preserving historical and architecturally significant places and buildings in and around Detroit, which is where the vast majority of Ford's early growth and later building took place.

"He wanted to tinker. I just feel sorry for him that he got so damned successful."

A taste of Ford discipline still hangs on the wall of the Piquette Avenue plant in Detroit, where ancient signs admonish "Positively no smoking" in the shadows where the Model T was cranked out.

It was at Ford's Highland Park plant that the $5 day caused a national furor. PHOTO: Julie May

Between Dearborn and Flat Rock, south of Detroit, the Gothic tops of concrete arches vault over railroad tracks that once were the Detroit, Toledo & Ironton Railway. They're the remnants of Ford's ill-fated personal attempt to make an electric railway, with power coming from the Rouge powerhouse. Today, each 27-ton arch slowly is spalling away, unused, as cars race by on nearby I-94.

In Highland Park, Pewabic tile still adorns the otherwise unidentified Ford Administration Building, and a lone Ford sign near the police impound lot signals the once mighty plant where the $5-a-day wage was initiated.

Out along the Huron River in Westland, Nankin Mills, a historic park and interpretive center, shows how Henry Ford wanted rural life to be.

The sprawl of the Rouge complex demonstrates his vision for a vertically integrated business. The channel that makes the Rouge River run straight past Zug Island is a relic of Henry Ford's Eagle Boat business during World War I.

In Dearborn, contra dance enthusiasts enjoy the special springy wooden floor of Lovett Hall at The Henry Ford museum, where Ford executives once were forced to show their steps at the master's whim.

The traces of the real Henry Ford are, like their maker, individualistic, quirky and even a little lonely.

You can reach Tim Moran at autonews@crain.com.