Glass Blowing, Giant Trains, Laboratories, and Chickens

Greenfield Village is part of the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, near Detroit. It composes 240 acres of pastures, working farms, historic buildings from all over the world, and craftworks.

The historical interpreters at some of the homes cook their own meals using period methods and foods. These ladies in a Colonial home from Massachusetts cooked over a fire in the hearth despite it being a very warm day and they also tend a large assortment of raised garden beds full of herbs, vegetables, and berries.

The time periods represented by the buildings and attractions range from the Colonial period in the early 1700s to the Depression era of the 1930s.


This 1930s home is wallpapered in newspapers and the ceiling is covered with cardboard. The small kitchen
is about the size of a walk-in closet and has a minuscule stove and canned goods lining the wall.
The chicken coop in the back is bigger than the kitchen.


Historic homes, a windmill, a covered bridge, the one room schoolhouse where Henry Ford went to school, a plantation house, a farmhouse complete with farm animals, and a Main Street populated by a general store, a milliners, a jewelry shop and more keep company with a working railroad, a tinworks, a glassworks, weavers, silk spinners, a sawmill, a pottery studio, and the fascinating laboratories of Thomas Edison, all handpicked by Henry Ford and meticulously moved to the site over the course of a few decades.

Bottles of minerals and plants line the walls of Edison's laboratory.

Ford was so precise and wanted the buildings to be so perfect that for some every brick and every nail were numbered and put back exactly in their original position when the structure was rebuilt on museum grounds.

Ladies working at the Eagle Tavern

Last year my friend Valerie and I went down in June and had tea at Cotswold Cottage. This year we ate at the Eagle Tavern and had chicken croquette, roasted potatoes, pickled eggs, muffins, and asparagus, all prepared as they would have been in 1831.

Interior of the Eagle Tavern

We strolled the grounds, watched the glass blowing, talked to people about chickens and quilting, and admired the sheep and their lambs.

A curious ewe.

We looked through Edison's laboratory and saw the huge steam freight engine (and I mean huge).

This steam engine was about two stories tall.

We soaked in some sunshine and talked about herbs and formal gardens and vegetable gardens. And chickens. Have I told you how much chickens occupy my mind lately?

This biddy looks pretty no-nonsense.

We had an all around nice day and great conversation.

This is the kitchen in the Maryland plantation home. Interpreters sew quilts entirely by hand but when I asked where the quilts went after they were finished, this interpreter said, "I don't know. We make them and then they disappear, taken to some of the other houses for the beds." This is actually a fairly accurate picture of what would happen to the things the plantation slaves would have made. On this plantation they made hundreds of pounds of butter every year but were never allowed to eat any of it.

Sometimes it's nice to just take a day off with a good friend and go back in time for awhile.

The glassblowers deserve a post just for them. In my opinion, this is one of the most interesting and
entertaining parts of Greenfield Village. Coming soon!

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Estate Sales - A Study in How We Value Our History

On Thursday and Friday I briefly stopped in at the tail end of an estate sale just down the street from my house. I found some great finds on the cheap, including

    ~bias tape, seam binding, rick rack, and pretty trimmings
    ~a big box of military maps from WWII
    ~a couple snazzy hats for myself and Zach
    ~pinking shears
    ~two swivel frames
    ~a glass juicer
    ~a fantastic globular vase
    ~wooden suit hangers

But as I was perusing the items in this house I got a bit depressed. Not only were a lot of items just sort of strewn around, which made me feel that we shoppers were being disrespectful of the former owner, there were personal items there that I would have thought this woman's family should have taken.

There was a box of photos and, most heartbreaking, a full baby book, with locks of hair, a birth certificate, hundreds of photos, and clippings. Why would this be left in the basement? Did she not have any family left who would cherish it? (Sad.) Did her surviving family see it and decide it wasn't worth keeping? (Sadder still.) Will it end up in a dumpster?

This brings up questions about how we value and care for our past, our histories, the stories of our families. What are you doing to keep your family's story alive? What are you doing to pass important family stories on to your children? Do you keep old things, even if you don't "need" them, so that you can pull them out and pass on your history to the next generation? Or are you so caught up in the here and now that the past will be forgotten?

True that we can't keep everything. But there are some things we should keep, guarding them for the next generation. What do you cherish from generations past? What do you wish you had now that got lost or sold?

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