Thoughts Become Things

Tuesday, July 5, 2016

Greenfield Village 7/5/2016

Another picture-perfect day greeted us as we departed the grey house yesterday. We rolled through the hills of NY and PA, through the home of Lucille Ball (Jamestown, NY, home of the Lucy and Desi memorial bridge and also to the Lucy Desi Center for Comedy), and through the farmlands of the midwest to our stopping place for 3 nights in Ypsilanti, MI.

Today we visited Greenfield Village, an 80-acre outdoor museum consisting of various historic buildings Henry Ford assembled from around the USA. At the museum, there are 83 authentic historic structures (disassembled at their original places and reassembled at Greenfield) , from the lab where Thomas Edison developed the lightbulb to the workshop where the Wright Brothers
developed their airplane, and the building where Abraham Lincoln practiced law. You can visit the home where Noah Webster wrote the first American dictionary and the farmhouse where Henry Ford grew up. To keep things authentic, Ford transported Thomas Edison's Menlo Park, NJ lab to Dearborn, along with 6 railroad cars full of NJ soil so the lab could sit on NJ soil. Throughout the village are actors and interpreters who bring the history of those places to life. According to Henry Ford, "We ought to know more about the families who founded this nation, and how they lived. One way to do that is to reconstruct as nearly as possible the conditions under which they lived." He did that wonderfully at Greenfield Village.


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