Every winter, Firestone farmers work hard preserving meats from our December butchering. Hams, bacon and fatback are all cured using a process that would have been very familiar to the Firestones in 1885.

Every day, Firestone farmers rub these cuts of meat with a mixture of salt, sugar and various spices. The salt dehydrates the meat, while sugar prevents it from getting too tough and the spices help to give the meat a nice flavor. It takes several weeks for larger cuts of meat like hams to finish curing. Once a week, old cure is removed from the meat and it is replaced with fresh cure.

Once the meat is cured, it is wrapped in cheesecloth sacks and hung in the cold room located in Firestone Farm’s cellar.

Near the meat are several other foods that were preserved last year, including dried chili peppers, pickles and crocks of sauerkraut as well as jars of tomatoes, pickled green beans, applesauce and more.

When you visit from April through November, make sure to check out the Firestone home's cellar and cold room - you'll be sure to notice our cured meat hanging from the ceiling in our cold room...and as the year progresses and the time for butchering once again approaches, there will be very little cured meat left hanging in cheesecloth.

#Behind The Scenes @ The Henry Ford, home life, food, farms and farming, Greenfield Village buildings, Greenfield Village, winter

Dotting the landscape of places like Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York are numerous Colonial-era homes and taverns where George Washington is said to have spent the night. Some of these claims are true; some are likely only wishful thinking. But the desire to claim a tangible connection to our Revolutionary War hero and first president runs strong.

As commander of the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War, General George Washington usually did sleep and eat in the nearby homes of well-to-do people during the eight years he led the American military campaign. But among George Washington’s camp equipage were tents, this folding bed, cooking and eating utensils, and other equipment that he used when encamped on the field with his troops.

Yet the George Washington camp bed in The Henry Ford’s collections is more than just a humble cot, used when no better option was available. This object symbolizes George Washington as a leader who cared more about his men and the cause of democracy than he did for himself.

In Henry Ford Museum’s With Liberty and Justice for All exhibit, visitors stand in quiet contemplation before the Washington camp bed on display, gazing at a humble cot where the great general took some weary rest during the struggle for American independence.

A great many stories of American ingenuity and innovation abound in Henry Ford Museum. But these stories generally do not involve military history. Why, then, display a bed associated with war?

With Liberty and Justice for All explores the proud and painful evolution of American freedom, from the Revolutionary War through the struggle for civil rights. This exhibit, then, is about social innovation:  new ideas that render old ways obsolete and radically alter how people think about themselves, their interactions with others, and the larger world.

The Revolutionary War became about more than just American independence from Britain. It evolved into a new way of thinking:  that it was possible for a people to govern themselves through a democratic system of elected representatives. The Revolutionary War also launched Americans on the road toward a newfound sense of national identity as Americans, rather than British subjects, New Englanders or Virginians. And George Washington was at the center of that new way of thinking.

Continue Reading

18th century, presidents, Henry Ford Museum, by Jeanine Head Miller

Since Thomas Edison’s birthday happened to be this past Saturday (February 11), it made me think of this first known portrait of him.

Even after 35 years of working with the museum’s photograph collections, this 3 x 2-3/4 inch daguerreotype still gives me goose bumps when I look at it. Made at the dawn of photographic technology, it serves as a powerful reminder of the unique connection between Henry Ford and Thomas Edison.

Because of Henry Ford's friendship with Edison, many objects, photographs and manuscripts became part of the museum's collections, including Edison's Menlo Park Laboratory.

This daguerreotype was a gift to us from Edison’s widow, Mina, probably in the 1930s. The depth of Henry Ford’s admiration for Thomas Edison was so great that he named his museum and village "Edison Institute" in honor of the inventor.  The dedication ceremony occurred on October 21, 1929, to coincide with Light's Golden Jubilee, the 50th anniversary of Edison's invention of the electric incandescent light bulb.

I find it fascinating to view this photographic image of the famous inventor when he was just a child. Daguerreotypes, invented in 1839, became very popular in the United States from the 1840s through the mid 1850s. The process took about 20 seconds, and Edison, shown at age 4, had to sit completely still! His seriousness and look of concentration go beyond the need for stillness. It seems to me that he is thinking about how and why the camera is working as much as obeying the adult admonition not to move.


Cynthia Read Miller, former Curator of Photographs and Prints at The Henry Ford, is continually fascinated with the museum’s over one million historical graphics.

Additional Readings:

• Edison at Work
• Edison's Light Fantastic
• Light’s Golden Jubilee Honors Thomas Edison and Dedicates a Museum
• Thomas Edison Photographs

archives, photographs, inventors, Thomas Edison, childhood, by Cynthia Read Miller

“You must be this small to enter.” How many times do you hear that in the workplace?

This week, our historic operating machinery specialist, Tim Brewer, and I have been squeezing between tie-down cables and sliding around underneath R. Buckminster Fuller's "house of the future," the Dymaxion House. We were part of the original team that restored this unique prototype and built it inside Henry Ford Museum.

Now, for the first time since it opened in October 2001, we have closed the house to the public; this shutdown will be for as brief a time as possible - we promise! - but it is essential to ensure the long-term preservation of the structure. (In the meantime, you can still view the exhibit and the exterior of the house from the platform.)

So what exactly is happening to the Dymaxion House during this time?

This extraordinary structure really does hang from the mast, with a cabled hoop (“cage”) system that the exterior wall “skin” floats on. We are using laser-levels to assess the relative movement of components in the cage system.

In addition, the flooring system (or deck) is made of hollow aluminum “beams,” with plywood attached with clip strips of bent aluminum. Right now we are determining the extent of wear on the deck  after 10 years of relatively trouble-free service.

As expected, we are finding more deterioration in the flooring path where visitors walk through the artifact, and we’ll be working hard over the next little while to repair any damages so our favorite house can delight the public for years to come. More details to come in a future post!

Senior Conservator Clara Deck has been a conservator at The Henry Ford for 20 years. Preserving the material integrity of the objects is her job - but making them look great is icing on the cake.

Additional Readings:

• Dymaxion House
  
• Gauging the Condition of the Dymaxion House
  
• Dymaxion House
  
• Drawing, "The Dymaxion House at Henry Ford Museum," 2002

#Behind The Scenes @ The Henry Ford, Henry Ford Museum, conservation, collections care, by Clara Deck, Dymaxion House, Buckminster Fuller

On August 11, 1909, as his ship struggled off Cape Hatteras, telegraph operator Theodore Haubner had an urgent choice to make: How should he call for help?

Haubner worked the key on the commercial steamship S.S. Arapahoe. His ship had just broken her propeller shaft and was drifting off the North Carolina coast.

For years, ships in trouble had used the telegraph code “CQD,” which means “calling all stations—distress.” But a new code for distress had recently been agreed upon: “SOS.” Would anyone recognize it?

Deciding to split the difference, Haubner signaled SOS as well as CQD—and his ship was picked up just twelve hours later.

Haubner had sent the world’s first SOS signal. He later donated his headphones and telegraph key to The Henry Ford, where they are now on exhibit in our Driving America exhibit.

Wireless telegraphy, perfected only a decade earlier by inventor and entrepreneur Guglielmo Marconi, used radio waves to connect ships with one another as well as with stations on land. In 1904, CQD was adopted by Marconi Company wireless telegraph operators as their emergency signal.

But an international industry would need an internationally standardized emergency signal. At the second International Radiotelegraphic Convention in Berlin, in 1906, participants agreed on SOS as the international distress signal. They chose SOS not because it was an abbreviation for any particular distress call (it does not stand for “save our ship,” as many have thought), but because it was easy to send and receive - three dots, three dashes, three dots. When the Arapahoe was drifting, the signal was just coming into use.

So why are these telegraph artifacts in an exhibit on cars?

When Haubner sent that first SOS in 1909, American culture was adjusting to a feeling of new, wider horizons. Wireless telegraphy was one of many technological marvels making their way into culture and, more slowly, into everyday life. Another of those marvels was the automobile.

Driving America puts cars into the context of these new visions of the future - this optimism that new technology, standardized across the world, could do anything.

Saving a ship was only the beginning.

Suzanne Fischer is the Associate Curator of Technology at The Henry Ford. She typed this post on an 1880s index typewriter and sent it to the blog editor via telex.

North Carolina, telegraphy, technology, Henry Ford Museum, Driving America, communication, by Suzanne Fischer, 20th century, 1900s

What does lounging by the pool on a hot day have to do with automotive restoration?

In the case of one of our antique vehicles, more than you think!

Early tires for automotive vehicles were made of natural rubber and were made in one piece - somewhat like a heavily reinforced inner tube. These tires are often referred to as "tube tires," and some of the more common sizes are still produced by specialty suppliers.

But not all sizes are still made, or even available - and this was the case recently with our department’s restoration of the 1899 Duryea Trap for the new Driving America exhibition.

This vehicle came to our labs as an older restoration that dated from the 1930s. It arrived in fairly poor condition, with seized corroded metal components, flaking paint, moth-eaten upholstery and the clincher: heavily degraded tires.

The artifact could not be put on display without tires, as a guest would likely focus on their absence and therefore miss the aesthetic beauty of this early horseless carriage

So what to do?

Believe it or not, it became a constant source of unending debate as to how to proceed, what materials to use...until - eureka!!

Summer was in full swing and with it came lounging by the pool. Our head of preservation, Mary Fahey, came to me with the observation that a common foam pool noodle had the right diameter for the tires we needed. So we thought, why not? We could make that work...after all, the vehicle would never need to run, as it was far too precious an object to risk the damage that a restoration of that extent - and its subsequent running - would cause. It didn’t even really need to roll, as we usually do not let vehicles with original tires touch the ground anyway! It was doable.

So we gathered up a few dollar store pool noodles as the base for our new tires and put them through a fairly extensive process, which involved strengthening them through multiple coatings of various flexible putties and a central reinforcing. This process produced the results that you now see.

We only hope that now that you know the full story - and what’s behind what appears to be a natural rubber tube tire - that you won’t focus too much on them and still consider the overall beauty of this precious artifact.

Robert Coyle is a transportation conservation specialist for The Henry Ford.

by Robert Coyle, conservation, collections care, cars, Henry Ford Museum, Driving America

The coming of a New Year is a great time to set resolutions, and for 2012, The Henry Ford has picked at least one doozy that we are very excited to share!

Over the course of the year, we will be digitizing our most “significant” icons in each of the core categories in our collections — and making those available on our collections website to anyone who is interested.

So what does that mean, and why are we so delighted about it?

Digitization is the process of making photos and information about the collections of The Henry Ford available online. In a way, this is a process that dates back to the founding of the institution, as artifacts have been catalogued and photographed over the years for internal purposes.

However, the information and images we’ve gathered and the ways in which we’ve stored those for our own usage don’t necessarily equate to the robust web presentation that we want to share with the world— so we have been spending a lot of time updating and standardizing catalog records, taking great new photographs of the collection, and writing brief narratives on the purpose and meaning of each object.

This is all part of a big project we’ve been calling CAN-DO: Collections Access Network for Digital Objects.

We really got going in earnest with this effort in 2011, with the bulk of the objects digitized either in or related to the new Driving America exhibit, which opens at the end of January. The Henry Ford obviously has very strong transportation collections, and this means that right now our digitized collections contain everything from the very rare and beautiful Bugatti...

 

...to an iconic Charles Sheeler photograph of the Ford Rouge plant in the late 1920s...

…and everything in between.

As 2011 began winding down, we started to think about what we would digitize in 2012. The Henry Ford has an embarrassment of riches in its collections, including hundreds of thousands of 3D objects and about 25 million 2D artifacts housed in the Benson Ford Research Center. Digitizing it all will be a multi-year, if not multi-decade, effort. What, we asked ourselves, should be our focus in 2012?

The answer was obvious: We need to make sure the public has digital access to the most “significant” artifacts at The Henry Ford. I put the term “significant” in quotation marks purposely, as significance has multiple meanings. Few could argue that an artifact like the city bus on which Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat is not a significant historical object. It is also institutionally unique. Many museums have civil rights artifacts, but there is only one Rosa Parks bus, and the only place to find it is at The Henry Ford.

The other dimension of “significance” is personal resonance. Certainly the Rosa Parks bus has personal significance for many people. But there’s also a pretty hefty degree to which personal significance diverges. For example, I wouldn’t necessarily expect this Buck Rogers poster to have personal significance for a large percentage of the public.

For me, though, this happens to be one of my very favorite collections objects that we’ve digitized thus far. It features a space pterodactyl, a disintegrator ray, rocketships, and many spacemen in dapper outfits, all illustrated with bright colors and fantastic graphic detail. These all happen to be things that I enjoy (space pterodactyls being a new but noteworthy addition to the list), so to me, this is particularly interesting.

We’ve been having a lot of interesting conversations about all the aspects of “significance” and how they relate to the collections of The Henry Ford, and have started throwing out ideas and making lists. Over the course of 2012, you will see these objects begin to show up on our collections website, but you’ll also hear about them in other ways — via blog posts from staff members, in the curators’ Pics of the Month and any other ways we can think of to share the stories that these objects tell.

We could not be more excited to start this project, and hope you are excited about it as well. Check our collections website frequently to visit your old favorites from the collections and discover new ones!

Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford, which she thinks is quite possibly the coolest job ever — even if it’s a hazard of the job that her favorite collections object changes about 10 times a day.

#Behind The Scenes @ The Henry Ford, by Ellice Engdahl, digitization, digital collections

When it comes to Halloween history, Curator of Domestic Life Jeanine Head Miller and Greenfield Village Director Jim Johnson really know their stuff! Read on for lots of little-known facts about the origins of what has become one of America's most popular holidays.

Immigrants who came to America brought their folk traditions and religious beliefs with them to the New World. Folk superstitions of the British Isles, particularly the Celts, converged with observances of the Catholic Church and traditional American harvest celebrations into a "witches brew" of traditions that created the American holiday of Halloween.

By the 1890s, Halloween was increasingly celebrated in America, as articles in magazines and newspapers helped popularize and spread Halloween traditions to a national audience. While the origins of Halloween were rooted in superstition and fortune telling, the holiday had become a night of mystery and innocent fun.

The first Halloween gatherings were designed as matchmaking parties for young people, with games to “predict” matrimonial futures and ample opportunity for innocent flirtation. By the 1910s, other adults and children had joined in the fun of Halloween parties and the practice of donning Halloween costumes gained popularity.

When postcards caught the public’s fancy during the early 1900s, people enjoyed sending colorful Halloween greetings to their family and friends. As the 20th century progressed, civic organizations increasingly promoted Halloween as an event for all. Many communities began to host public celebrations that included festivals, parties and costumed parades.

The Henry Ford is home to quite a collection of Halloween items, including several Dennison's Bogie Books, on which we have based our Hallowe'en in Greenfield Village artwork over the past several years; these were essentially advertising catalogs for the Denison Paper Company, which exists now as Avery Dennison (the label and office products company).

The Denison Paper Company specialized in paper party goods, particularly crêpe paper, and their Bogie Books were developed as a vehicle to sell everything from Halloween costumes to decor.

The books were published from 1912-1926, except for 1918, when Halloween was essentially cancelled that year due to the severe and quite deadly flu pandemic - no one held parties or went trick-or-treating to avoid further spreading flu germs. Dennison's Bogie Books began at a cost of five cents in 1912 and were priced at ten cents by 1926; the next year, they changed formats and eventually stopped selling Halloween-only guides by the 1930s.

We also recently added a set of 1920s-era Halloween decorations to our collections, which were made by the Beistle Company in Pennsylvania and include invitations, lampshades, placecards, candle holders, party picks, nut cups and fortunes that were given to partygoers.

Finally, you may have wondered: Why exactly do we spell Hallowe'en that way?

When the Christian church began to expand its influences, the focus of these old pagan rituals was re-associated with All Saints' or Hallows' Day. The night before this feast became known as All Hallows' Even, which was eventually abbreviated to Hallowe'en - and this spelling was common well into the 1930s.

20th century, 19th century, holidays, Halloween, events, by Jim Johnson, by Jeanine Head Miller

This week, we marked 10 years that R. Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion House has been on exhibit in Henry Ford Museum!

This prefabricated house was reconstructed mostly from the parts salvaged from the only two Dymaxion Houses ever made - one of which was inhabited by the Graham family of Wichita, Kansas.

Did you know that a family actually lived in a Dymaxion House? It's true - William Graham, an original investor in Fuller Houses Inc., purchased the two prototypes and lived in a hybridized version of it from 1948 until the 1970s.

Fast forward to present day (last week, actually), when we came across this tweet:

It turns out that Robby Simpson, a fifth-grade science teacher at Columbus Academy in Columbus, Ohio, and his school have been bringing students to The Henry Ford for the Great American Museum Experience (G.A.M.E.) program for years, and they always enjoyed the Dymaxion House exhibit. As it turns out, Ted Graham's daughter began attending Columbus Academy recently, and last week he offered to come talk to the fifth graders about his experience growing up in such a remarkable building before they made their trip to Dearborn to see the real thing.

Watch the video to hear some of the great things we learned from the visiting fifth graders, including:

As a boy, Ted Graham loved to climb on the aluminum-alloy window ledge, which runs around the inside of the whole building. He would use the cable-support system to work his way all the way around!

The house was very hot in the summer! In order to make the roof quieter and more watertight, Ted's father had insulated and sealed the roof and removed the ventilator on top, so the air circulation system that Fuller had in mind was interrupted.

If your Dymaxion house is very close to a lake, you can position a trampoline so that you can jump from the roof, to the trampoline, and into the lake!

Because the house was made of metal, every time it warmed up or cooled down, it would make spooky creaking noises!

Additional Readings:

• The Dymaxion House: A New Way of Living
  
• Membership Spotlight: Blake Almstead
  
• “Tuning” the Dymaxion House
  
• Dymaxion House at its 1948-1991 Site, near Andover, Kansas

education, Henry Ford Museum, childhood, home life, Dymaxion House, Buckminster Fuller

 

 

Steve Jobs, Apple’s visionary co-founder, passed away yesterday, and the web is filled with an astounding outpouring of respect and gratitude for his work.  It’s a testament to the impact personal technology – mass-produced consumer products – can have on people’s lives.

 

 

At The Henry Ford, we document not only the work of innovators, but the ways people use technology in their everyday lives.  We collect artifacts that by their physicality and tangibility, their heft and their look, connect visitors to history and the lives of the people who used them. The Apple products in our collection – including an Apple IIe, a Lisa, a Macintosh, an iMac, an iPod and an iPhone – were used by ordinary people to write, teach, do business, play games, listen to music and connect to each other.  Jobs’ product genius was in making those activities easy, transparent and fun – and in making the products highly desirable.

 

 

In the early 1980s, with Jobs at Apple’s helm, the company popularized the mouse and “graphic user interface” – the cheerful icons and desktop and folder metaphors that we still use in everyday computing.  These innovations made computing accessible to everybody, not only people who could code. Over at our OnInnovation site, Steve Wozniak, Apple’s brilliant engineer co-founder, talks about how making computing fun and easy was the company’s goal from the beginning.

 

 

Jobs famously described the company as located at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts. He infused a respect for creativity, intelligence and design into the company’s products – integrating color graphics quite early, for instance, and making one of his own passions, music, the key to a new kind of product, the digital music player.

 

 

The products Apple made under Jobs were never cheap.  They were aspirational consumer goods that promised to make your life better, to make you a cool nonconformist, to make you “think different.”  Did they? Maybe and maybe not, but Jobs’ legacy reminds us that our tools can change not only the way we live our lives, but the way we think about ourselves.

 

Suzanne Fischer is former Curator of Technology at The Henry Ford.

20th century, 21st century, 2010s, technology, music, in memoriam, computers, communication, by Suzanne Fischer