Village industries
Download coordinates as: Henry Ford's Village Industries were small factories located in rural areas of Michigan.
Ford developed his Village Industries in part to provide farm workers a stable source of income during the winter months.
[1] At the same time, he recognized that the promise of high wages was encouraging young people to discard the agrarian life of their parents and move to the cities.
The spreading of industrialization (due in part, Ford knew, to his very own factory system) was making farming less attractive and giving farmers less to do in the winter.
[2] Ford developed the village industries program as a way to bring manufacturing jobs to the countryside, allowing residents to reap the economic advantages without giving up their agricultural heritage.
[1] His village industries were intended to strengthen rural communities by providing jobs to unemployed and under-employed local residents,[3] allowing farmers to work in the winter and return to farming in the summer.
[2] It was also, in a very real sense, intended to maintain the bucolic settings and lifestyles that Ford remembered from his boyhood and idealized to some extent.
[3] Ford felt that decentralization held many advantages, in particular that managing the comings and goings of a large number of employees at any one site became problematic.
[4] In 1918, Ford made his first purchase of a village industry site when he bought Nankin Mills (now part of Westland, Michigan on the Rouge River.
[6] Nankin Mills was in fact familiar to Ford: as a boy he had travelled with his father to the site to grind grain.
Ford reconfigured the Northland property into a valve manufacturing facility by moving machinery in from the Fordson and Highland Park plants.
[3] After that, there was something of a lull in the village industry program, with only two new plants, in Flat Rock and Ypsilanti, opened in the next ten years.
[3] However, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Ford moved to rapidly expand the village industry concept, opening plants in Tecumseh, Newburg, Dundee, Brooklyn, Saline, Milan, Milford, Sharon Hollow, Willow Run, and Manchester.
many of these plants, opening in the middle of the Great Depression, had a profound economic effect on the community, employing dozens or hundreds of workers who would otherwise have been unemployed or have moved away.
The small manufacturing plants were not a financial success,[10] and the stricter accountability procedures implemented after Henry Ford relinquished the presidency in 1945 found that they did not return optimal cost/benefit ratios.
Ford Motor Company itself says that "more than 30 Village Industries plants sprouted throughout Michigan, Ohio, Mississippi, New York and other states.
[15] He reconfigured the mill into a valve manufacturing facility by moving machinery in from the Fordson and Highland Park plants,[9] and opened it as the first of the village industries in 1920.
[15] The building reflects the then-current industrial architecture, as well as hints of Art Deco in the brickwork and entryway styling[17] but still incorporated a water wheel.
[20] It was designated a Michigan State Historic Site in 1967;[20] in the mid-1980s, Nankin Mills became the headquarters of the Wayne County Park System.
The Phoenix Mill plant closed in 1948, and Ford turned it over to the Wayne County Road Commission, who used it as a maintenance yard.
The plant employed up to 210 people making precision gauges;[14] the workers had been transferred from New Jersey when Ford purchased another company originally located there.
[8] A new building was designed for the site, and was constructed through a partnership among Ford, the Wayne County Road Commission, and the New Deal Works Progress Administration program.
[35] In 1846, Alfred Wilkerson built the nearby log dam, and in 1848-49 he replaced the earlier sawmill with the current structure, a gristmill.
[36] Davis continued to use the site as a flour and feed mill, but in 1910 sold it to the Dundee Hydraulic Power Company.
Ford purchased the Auto Dash factory and nearby property and in 1938 opened a plant, officially known as the "Pettibone Creek Hydroelectric Station," on the Upper Mill Pond.
[42] The plant consisted of two hydroelectric powerhouses (the Huron River and Pettibone Creek stations) and a manufacturing facility.
[14] However, the processing equipment was soon obsolete,[45] and in 1962, the property was turned into an antique shop and general store, know first as the "Sauk Trail Inn".
[48] After the war, the line returned to making horn buttons and starter switches until 1954, when production shifted to armrests and lamp lenses.
[52] Thornton used it until the early 1970s, after which the building was owned by a series of small manufacturers,[14] including Economy Baler, a maker of scrap compressors,[10] Brooklyn Products, Hoover Universal, Johnson Controls, and Cincinnati Milacron.
[14] The plant was unique in that part of its purpose was to provide work for World War II veterans who suffered physical or mental disabilities die to their wartime service.
