America: From Rural Times, Through Steam, to World War II—The Guts and Glory Years Discovered in Dearborn, Michigan

It’s tempting to look back on the agricultural years of the past as being romantically perfect.  Yanking us out of the past was no easy task.  It took brilliance and dedication to discover the machinery that would not only change our economy, but change our thought.  As new inventions occurred, they moved us from a nation that used slaves to one with a new character.  The Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village depict the change in America from rural times, through the steam era, and through WWII. A trip to Dearborn presented not only a museum full of inventions, but insights into our national character.

The Firestone Farmhouse, demonstrates life as it was in rural years.  Yes, they eat the pigs they raise.  The picture here on the right is of hams they have raised and smoked.  They heat water and launder clothes by hand.  They have a charming little parlor, but also an outhouse.

At the Henry Ford Museum, steam power is displayed, from mighty locomotives that got the nation moving to mine equipment.

My friend Sue by two steam engines.

The textile mills girls stood long hours at their machines, but it pales to the slave labor in the cotton fields.  

Mill girls from 1850.                                                             A replica of Thomas Edison's Menlo Park.


The struggle to move the United States past a slave labor economy has outdistanced the social challenges of race relations, and you can see the chair in which Lincoln was assassinated  as well as the bus in which Rosa Parks defied the system.

 

At Willow Run airport, the B-17 is still available to scare the pants off you and bounce you around in the air until you wonder how anyone could keep their breakfast down.  The sheer guts it must have taken to get in a newfangled machine like this, go up in the air and get shot at.

I asked the man at the Henry Ford museum what was one idea he’d like to see visitors come away with, and he said that change was necessary to development, that stagnation was our enemy, and that new ideas take work and failure, on the road to success.  As a historian, I'm grateful to those who came before us, but find glory in the future.