Tecumseh's Hayden Mill, where Henry Ford turned soybeans into car parts

Henry Ford was convinced the car of the future would be partly grown on a farm, and for a while a mill in downtown Tecumseh was where he tried to prove it. The building had ground grain on the River Raisin since the 1830s. Ford rebuilt it and reopened it in 1935 as one of his “village industries.”

The idea behind those little plants was pure Ford: small factories, set on country rivers and run on water power, so a farm family could pull factory wages a few miles from home without leaving the land. He scattered a couple dozen of them across the Rouge, Huron, Raisin, Saline, and Clinton rivers. Tecumseh’s was on the Raisin.

The strange, very Ford part is what came through the door. He was obsessed with soybeans — he wore a suit made partly of them once, to make the point — and at Hayden Mill the crew, up to about 25 people, cleaned, packed, and stored soybeans grown on the farms around town. The beans went off to be pressed into oil for paint and into an early plastic Ford molded into car parts. A Michigan crop, turned into a Michigan fender.

The experiment did not outlive its inventor’s enthusiasms. During World War II the little plant switched to making parts for B-24 bombers, and it closed for good in 1948. The building survived all of it. Known today as the Hayden-Ford Mill, it stands on the River Raisin in downtown Tecumseh and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places — a tidy brick reminder that the man who built the Model T spent real money betting on the humble soybean.