Fair Lane: the Dearborn estate Henry Ford lit with his own river

The richest man in Dearborn built his house on a river so he could make his own electricity. Henry Ford could have bought power from anyone. Instead, at Fair Lane — the 56-room limestone home he and Clara Bryant Ford settled into in 1915 on the bank of the Rouge — he dammed the river and ran the whole estate off hydroelectric turbines in a powerhouse near the water. When the lights dimmed at the house, they sometimes dimmed in a chunk of the surrounding town too, because the same turbines fed part of Dearborn.

The powerhouse is the building Ford really loved. The cornerstone was laid by his close friend Thomas Edison, the man who’d given Ford his first big break years earlier in Detroit. Inside, Ford kept a private laboratory where he tinkered with engines, a 12-car garage with a turntable so he never had to back a car out, and the turbines humming below. A 300-foot underground tunnel connects it to the main house, so the Fords could walk from parlor to power plant without stepping outside in a Michigan January.

The grounds were the work of Jens Jensen, the great prairie-style landscape architect, who shaped meadows, a cascade, and woodland paths across what was once 1,300 acres of farmland — sited deliberately within a few miles of where both Henry and Clara were born. The house itself, with its bowling lane and indoor pool, was grand but pointedly not the gaudiest mansion of the Gilded Age; Ford wanted comfortable, not flashy.

Fair Lane is a National Historic Landmark now, on Evergreen Road beside the University of Michigan-Dearborn campus. A long restoration is bringing it back to how it looked around 1919 — down to the powerhouse where a car man quietly proved a house could run on a river.