Henry Ford Museum

I love cars. Always have. Especially the beautifully crafted motorized coaches of the 1930s and the swift rocket machines of the late 50s and early 60s. There was a time in my youth when my fondest desire was to go to Detroit and design automobiles. Spent most of that energy building Soap Box Derby racers.

Anyway, I've always wanted to visit the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, just outside Detroit. The "Henry Ford" doesn't pay homage just to the automobile. It's vast holdings are a tribute to American creativity, industriousness, and vision of all types. You can see Thomas Edison's laboratory or Buckminster Fuller's "Dymaxion" house or the bus that Rosa Parks rode into history.

All these things are important and interesting, but I was there chiefly to see the cars. And boy do they have cars! To see everything at the Henry Ford would take days. The other exhibits and collections will have to wait for a future visit.

Henry Ford didn't invent the car. But he figured out how to mass produce them and get them into the hands of millions of people. His genius was the assembly line. At the museum you can see an "exploded" Model T and learn how it all came together on the line.

There are hundreds of automobiles on display. I was pleased to see that they weren't confined to just Ford models, although there are plenty of Fords. There are Chevies and other GM products, along with Chryslers, and long gone Packards, Hudsons, Nashes, Cords, and on and on. And that's just the American cars. There are plenty of rides from other countries as well.

A few examples:

A customized late 40s Mercury:

Classic '56 Chevy Bel Air with an early McDonald's sign:

Futuristic concept car:

First RV used by Charles Kuralt for "On the Road" ...










You can walk through these halls full of automobiles and see over a century of history unfold in boundless shapes of sheet metal. Running boards to tail fins to solar panels, it's all good. It's inspiring to see the inventiveness, engineering skill, artistry, and imagination that went into these machines. I can't wait to come back and see what else the Henry Ford has in store.