Henry Ford Moved Thomas Edison's Actual Laboratory to Michigan — Brick by Brick
Henry Ford moved Thomas Edison's actual Menlo Park laboratory to Michigan, brick by brick, and had a frail Edison relight his lamp there in 1929.
When Henry Ford built Greenfield Village, his outdoor history museum in Dearborn, he didn’t just put up replicas. He went out and physically moved real, historic American buildings to Michigan. Then he put them back together. The place became a kind of greatest-hits album of American ingenuity.
His boldest project was the Menlo Park laboratory complex of his hero and friend, Thomas Edison. That was the New Jersey “invention factory” where Edison developed the practical light bulb and the phonograph. By the time Ford got to it, much of the original complex was in ruins. So Ford had railcars of the original materials shipped to Dearborn — boards, bricks, even equipment. He rebuilt the lab in painstaking detail. Only two of the original structures survived to be moved in one piece: the Glass House and the Sarah Jordan boardinghouse. The rest he pieced back together from what he could find.
Ford dedicated the museum on October 21, 1929 — exactly 50 years after Edison’s light bulb breakthrough. He called the celebration “Light’s Golden Jubilee” and gave it a crown jewel. A frail Edison himself sat down in his transplanted Michigan laboratory and lit the electric lamp all over again.
Greenfield Village now holds around 100 historic buildings on its grounds. Among them: the Wright brothers’ bicycle shop and home (from Dayton, Ohio), poet Robert Frost’s house, and the train depot where a young Edison was once thrown off a train.
Where to see it
Greenfield Village at The Henry Ford, in Dearborn, Michigan. The Village is typically open mid-April through the end of the year; the adjacent Henry Ford Museum is open year-round.