The Rosa Parks bus, Lincoln chair, and Kennedy limousine are in Dearborn

The easiest way to understand The Henry Ford is that it offers two kinds of history on one Dearborn campus. The indoor museum puts major artifacts in front of you. Greenfield Village lets you walk through historic buildings and carefully reconstructed settings. Henry Ford began collecting in the early 1900s, and the museum and village opened to the public in 1929.

The National Park Service’s landmark record describes the museum as holding one of the country’s important collections of Americana and Greenfield Village as a precedent-setting open-air museum. Here are a few of the objects that make that description feel real:

• the Montgomery bus on which Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in 1955, authenticated and restored by the museum;
• the presidential limousine John F. Kennedy was riding in when he was assassinated in 1963, later rebuilt and returned to presidential service;
• the chair Abraham Lincoln was sitting in when he was assassinated at Ford’s Theatre;
• the Wright brothers’ fourth bicycle shop, moved from Dayton to Greenfield Village; and
• the Menlo Park laboratory complex, reconstructed with surviving material and period evidence rather than moved to Michigan as one intact building.

That last distinction matters across the village. The National Park Service inventory counts nearly 100 buildings, structures, and objects on the landmark grounds. Some historic buildings were relocated; other settings were reconstructed. “Nearly 100 relocated buildings” turns that varied collection into something it is not.

If your time is limited, pick the museum for the bus, chair, limousine, and other large artifacts. Pick Greenfield Village when you want to spend more of the visit walking through buildings and outdoor spaces. Either way, Dearborn is not holding replicas of those three headline objects. They are the historic artifacts themselves.