Ford Museum (Not in Philly)
but i thoguht it belonged in strange.
Quote:
Mass Production:
Ford's Odd Collection
Is a Model Museum
Curators Admire His Eye
For History's Details:
Rosa's Seat; JFK's Limo
By JEFFREY ZASLOW
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
DEARBORN, Mich. -- Fifty-eight-year-old Sue Dunham stood next to a limousine at the Henry Ford Museum last week, and suppressed the urge to reach out. "I'd just like to close my eyes and feel its energy," she said, noticing the "do not touch" sign. "It would be like touching the past."
Another museum visitor, seven-year-old Lydea Swit, heard adults talking about the president assassinated in this limousine. As two friends stood by, she somberly explained the significance. "It's Abraham Lincoln's car," she said.
No, she was told, this is the car in which John F. Kennedy was shot 40 years ago. But the bloodstained chair Abraham Lincoln sat in when he was shot is just down the hall, past the test tube containing Thomas Edison's dying breath, past the lantern that allegedly started the Chicago fire in 1871, past the limo Ronald Reagan was pushed into when he was shot. Here, too, are storerooms containing 650,000 artifacts Henry Ford accumulated, many of them signifying momentous instants in American history.
In 2003, it's clear that the auto pioneer was on to something with his odd collection. He was disdainful of the history available in books, calling it "mostly bunk." But "history you can see is of great value," he said. In the first half of the 20th century, while Ford's millionaire contemporaries were collecting the art of old masters, he was creating his big museum complex -- now dubbed "The Henry Ford" -- on 212 acres here.
Saturday, museum-goers will gather at the Kennedy limo to mark the 40th anniversary of the president's death. The car was a leased 1961 Lincoln Continental that was rebuilt with titanium armor and a hardtop and used by four more presidents before the government returned it to Ford Motor Co.
The limo and countless other objects in this 74-year-old museum are "compressed evocations, and the American people know how to read the symbolism in them," says the facility's president, Steve Hamp. In a weak economy, when other museums were canceling restoration efforts, Mr. Hamp spent $60 million last year to reinvigorate Ford's quirky vision of a museum. The gamble paid off: The Henry Ford had 1.5 million paid visitors in 2002, and attendance was up 35% this summer.
In his time, Ford was often mocked for his collecting. Now curators at other museums call him a visionary.
At the Mutter Museum, part of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, visitors see items such as a tumor removed from Grover Cleveland's jaw. "There's nothing more intimate than a part of a person's body," says Gretchen Worden, the museum's director. "There's an emotional and intellectual power you feel when you see an actual piece of an historical figure."
The National Museum of Health & Medicine, in Washington, displays seven tiny pieces of President Lincoln's skull, a lock of his hair, the bullet that killed him and casts of his hands made after the election of 1860. One hand is swollen from several days of shaking voters' hands. "Glimpsing that, you can see this mortal person made immortal," says Adrianne Noe, the museum's director.
Her museum also displays the amputated leg of Civil War Maj. Gen. Daniel Sickles. He donated it just after losing it at the battle of Gettysburg in 1863. Until his death in 1914, he often visited it at the museum.
At the Fall River (Mass.) Historical Society, the trial of Lizzie Borden for the 1892 murder of her parents is recalled in exhaustive exhibits of physical evidence: blood-spotted pillow shams, the infamous hatchet, the contents of her parents' stomachs. "When people see these things, Lizzie Borden becomes a real person to them," says Dennis Binette, the society's assistant curator. Though Ms. Borden was acquitted, she was ostracized by the community for the next 34 years.
Thomas Edison's dying breath, held in a test tube at the Henry Ford Museum.
John Reznikoff, a Westport, Conn., dealer in historical items, has lent exhibitions locks of hair from George Washington, Napoleon, Albert Einstein and 117 other notables. He owns the car President Kennedy rode in when he visited Fort Worth, Texas, hours before his fateful ride in Dallas. "It's the last car he got out of alive," says Mr. Reznikoff, who hopes to sell it to a museum or collector for $1 million.
Henry Ford foresaw the lure of such stuff. Embarrassed by his lack of education, Ford began compulsively collecting things partly in reaction to a humiliating trial in 1919. He had sued the Chicago Tribune for libel after the newspaper called him an "ignorant" anarchist. In cross-examination, the paper's attorney hammered at Ford's lack of historical knowledge. Asked for the date of the Revolutionary War, for instance, the automaker guessed 1812. (Mr. Ford won the case, but a jury awarded him just six cents.)
"He was made out to be an imbecile," recalls Ford Bryan, 91, who worked at Ford Motor Co. from 1941 to 1974, and knew Henry Ford. Adds Russ Banham, author of "The Ford Century": "Whether for altruistic reasons or defensively, Henry Ford decided that real history is the stuff you can see and feel. In effect, he created his own Smithsonian."
Ford began amassing history by the trainload. He had whole buildings dismantled, crated up and brought here: the Ohio bike shop where the Wright brothers built their first airplane, the Connecticut home where Noah Webster wrote his dictionary; parts of Mr. Edison's New Jersey lab. He also acquired George Custer's hat, Mr. Edison's dentures and a letter from bank robber Clyde Barrow praising Ford's products as getaway cars.
In seeking items that spoke to key moments in history, he ended up with some fakes, too, such as the fiddle Nero played while Rome burned in 64 A.D. (Such violins weren't invented until the 1500s.) Likewise, the museum discovered in the early 1980s that the lantern that supposedly started the 1871 Chicago fire was manufactured after 1913.
But most items here are genuine, and even those that are peculiar often feel meaningful. Ford idolized his friend Edison. The inventor's last breath, in 1931, was captured in a test tube by his son and given to Ford. For many people today, that breath of air is especially poignant.
"It connects me to Edison's life," said museum visitor Rita Miller as she stood last week at the glass case holding the test tube. "It makes me realize that he was a living person who breathed."
The museum's president, Mr. Hamp, 55, came to the facility in 1978 as an intern, and later married Henry Ford's great-granddaughter, Sheila. He continues to seek objects that stand for a moment when America "fundamentally changed." For instance, for $500,000, he acquired the Montgomery, Ala., bus believed to be the one on which Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat to a white man in 1955. All day long, visitors lower themselves into that third-row seat.
The bus is near the wooden rocking chair President Lincoln sat in at a Washington theater the night John Wilkes Booth shot him. Henry Ford bought it at an auction for $2,400 in 1929. For Mr. Hamp, the chair gives silent testimony: "It says that this is the price this president paid for refusing to let the American experiment be broken."
Write to Jeffrey Zaslow at jeffrey.zaslow@wsj.com
Updated November 21, 2003
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11-21-2003, 02:07 PM
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