Henry Ford's little mill on the River Raisin in Dundee

Alfred Wilkerson put up the three-story stone mill on the River Raisin in 1848, grinding wheat and buckwheat for farmers who hauled grain in by wagon. It changed hands for decades — Henry Smith paid $8,000 for it in 1880, Captain R.B. Davis ran it after that — and by the 1920s, with Detroit Edison wiring the village for electricity, the old water-powered mill simply went quiet. In 1931 the village talked about tearing it down.

Then Henry Ford bought it. Ford had a soft spot for small water-powered shops, and he was building a whole network of them across southern Michigan: his “Village Industries,” little factories planted in farm towns so men could work a lathe in winter and their own fields in summer. In 1935 he stripped the Dundee mill back to its timber frame, rebuilt it on the old lines, and added a limestone powerhouse with turbines and generators. The plant’s job was small and exact — it turned out welding tips for Ford’s giant factories upriver in Detroit.

The arrangement outlived Ford himself. The company let the mill go in the 1950s, a paper firm used it for a stretch, and in 1970 the Village of Dundee bought the whole thing for a single dollar. It sat empty again until 1981, when a committee of locals took on the long job of fixing it up. Today it runs as the Old Mill Museum, with the River Raisin still sliding past the same stone walls, and the turbine pit Ford installed still down in the basement where he left it.

It’s an odd little monument: not the assembly line that made Ford famous, but the opposite idea — that a man who built the world’s biggest factories also wanted to save the smallest kind of shop, the kind a single creek could run.