Michigan Holds Some of America's Most Important Historic Artifacts — Including the Limo JFK Was Riding In

The Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village tell an even bigger story: the sheer staggering scope of what Henry Ford collected. Ford didn’t just build cars; late in life he became perhaps the most ambitious collector of American history who ever lived, and he spent a fortune assembling a kind of physical encyclopedia of American ingenuity in Dearborn.

The collection is almost overwhelming. At The Henry Ford (the museum and village together) you can stand in front of:

• the actual bus on which Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in 1955 — you can board it and sit in her seat;
• the presidential limousine in which John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963 (it was later rebuilt and remained in presidential service for years afterward);
• the rocking chair Abraham Lincoln was sitting in when he was assassinated at Ford’s Theatre;
• the lab equipment of Thomas Edison, plus Edison’s actual Menlo Park laboratory, which Ford had dismantled and rebuilt in Michigan;
• the Wright Brothers’ bicycle shop, also moved brick-by-brick to Dearborn.

Greenfield Village alone holds nearly 100 historic structures that Ford had relocated from around the country — homes of famous inventors, working farms, a functioning 19th-century town. It’s one of the largest indoor-outdoor history museums in America, and the vehicle collection is considered the most significant of its kind anywhere.

It’s a slightly eccentric monument — a car magnate’s personal mission to preserve the tangible objects of American history — but the result is that some of the most important physical artifacts in the country sit not in Washington, D.C., but in a suburb of Detroit.