Ford Piquette Avenue Plant Museum

travel 2 Minutes

Here’s more from my visit with Lena. After the Michigan Central tour, we were going to tour the Fisher Building. We still had some time left until that tour, and Lena suggested we go to another museum—Ford Piquette Avenue Plant. The museum looked rather small, so we thought we would check out everything in forty minutes and then go to our Art Deco tour.

However, we spent there two and a half hours, and we easily could have spent more.

Here you can learn more about an amazing story of the first Ford Plant building and how it was saved. We didn’t know any of that when we entered the building. We were told that the tour would start in 20 minutes, and we decided to wait, and meanwhile to walk around.

What happened after that was a show that Lena called the best tour she had ever attended. Our tour guide was a former Ford engineer who worked there for 32 years, and after that, he became a tour guide. After that, he was a part of the group that raised the funds to purchase that building and saved it, and made it a museum.

He started the tour by showing a Dodge promotional video from the 1920s, which gives you a completely different perspective of what cars are for.

Then, he walked us through the building, asking us “what we want to know,” and there was no question he could not answer! He was saying that “everything was on the internet,” but it was amazing how he kept this knowledge organized :). The museum has all models from A to the famous T, which was designed and built in this building, and all of the cars are in working condition. Our tour guide could tell us everything about each model: what was the maximum speed, gallons/hour fuel usage, the number of cars made, gas tank capacity, you name it.

Ther conveyer belt was not in use yet. The cars were assembled at the several stations:

In the morning, the crew would come and start working on a car, and by the end of the workday, they would drive the new car out of the plant.

That’s where things happened
There was a story about that car. The museum was looking for that particular model, and then one farmer responded saying he has it. When the museum curators arrived to his place, he led them into a barn full of boxes. He said his son disassembled the car and never put it together. When the museum curators started to put this car together, it turned out that that was number 1 car of that series!
Ford’s wife preferred electric cars:). I didn’t know that they existed back then!

That’s not everything we saw, but I think I should stop now. And if you feel an information overload, imagine how we felt upon leaving the museum!

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Published by Hettie D.

My name is Henrietta (Hettie) Dombrovskaya. I was born in Saint-Petersburg, Russian (actually, back then – Leningrad, USSR) in 1963, and immigrated to the United States in 1996. I love Saint Petersburg, the city I was born and raised in, and I think it’s one of the most beautiful places in the world. Similarly (but differently) I love Chicago, and can’t imagine myself moving somewhere else in the observable future. I have three children, Igor, Vlad and Anna, all adults living on their own, and one (so far) granddaughter Nadia. I also believe that my children are the best thing that happened in my life. As for my professional life, I am working in the field of Information Technologies. When I was twenty, I’ve declared that the databases are the coolest thing invented and that I want to do them for the rest of my life. Thirty plus years later, I still believe it’s true, and still, believe that the databases are the best. These two statements together imply that I think a person can have it all, and indeed, I think so! Keep reading my journals to find out how I did it.

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