Porch Notes
Henry Ford Moved Thomas Edison's Actual Laboratory to Michigan — Brick by Brick
History and culture
When Henry Ford built his outdoor history museum, Greenfield Village, in Dearborn, he didn’t just put up replicas. He went out and physically moved real, historic American buildings to Michigan and reassembled them — turning the place into a kind of greatest-hits album of American ingenuity.
His most ambitious project was the Menlo Park laboratory complex of his hero and friend, Thomas Edison — 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 — and reconstructed the lab in painstaking detail. Of the original structures, only two survived to be moved in one piece (the Glass House and the Sarah Jordan boardinghouse); the rest he rebuilt from the pieces he could find.
Ford dedicated the museum on October 21, 1929 — exactly 50 years after Edison’s light bulb breakthrough — in a celebration called “Light’s Golden Jubilee.” The crown jewel of the evening: a frail Edison himself sat down in his transplanted Michigan laboratory and ceremonially lit the electric lamp all over again.
Greenfield Village now holds around 100 historic buildings on its grounds, including 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.