A team at The Henry Ford is well underway on an exciting project funded by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). Staff from our conservation, photography, collections management, registrars and curatorial departments have been working together to process materials currently stored in the museum’s Collections Storage Building. We are focused on the Agriculture and the Environment Collection and related collections that can tell agricultural and environmental stories.
During this two-year grant project, we will conserve, catalog, digitize and rehouse an estimated 1,750 items. Here is a behind-the-scenes look at one of the many artifacts we've already processed that seem simple but reveal complicated agricultural histories. Recent work on a Turkish coffeepot provides a glimpse into the history of coffee as an agricultural commodity.
During the colonial era in America, British regulation over trade goods strained the relationship between colonists and British officials. You’ve likely heard much about tea, but coffee played a role in the resistance too. American ships became involved in the re-export of goods from Latin America through the new United States market, and therefore Americans acquired a taste for coffee as it arrived to them via countries like Brazil. Throughout the Revolutionary era, families ground coffee in their homes using coffee mills. Coffee consumption escalated in America thanks to re-exports in the new market. Once Americans realized the effects of caffeine, coffee became a staple for soldiers, travelers and families alike.
Coffeepot / THF193626
In the early 20th century, Americans enjoyed coffee more than ever. Turkish coffee in particular contains high levels of caffeine produced from a finely ground dark roast. It is made with boiling water in a cezve, a small pot with a long handle and lip for pouring. Consumers of the 1920s felt that Turkish coffee was thicker and more flavorful than the coffee of the past, and many Turkish coffeepots were produced during this era.
Coffeepot / THF193627
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The 1909 Sears Model H Motor Buggy – basic, reliable transportation. / THF88309
Long before Amazon, American consumers counted on another company to deliver their wants and needs through the mail: Sears, Roebuck & Company. Founded in Chicago in 1892, Sears grew into the largest mail-order retailer — and, ultimately, the largest retailer, period — in the United States. Over the years, the company’s voluminous catalogs offered everything from clothing to appliances to farm equipment to houses. But even folks who remember those catalogs well might be surprised by another of its past products: automobiles.
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Graphic designer Steve Frykholm's picnic poster series for furniture company Herman Miller is inspired by classic outdoor eats, like sweet corn. The series represents some of the best known examples of American graphic design from the latter half of the 20th century. / THF188350
Watermelon, popsicles, barbecued chicken, hot dogs, sweet corn, lemonade and cherry pie. These are quintessential American picnic foods — sticky, drippy foods best eaten with your hands while sitting on a picnic blanket in the summer heat with friends or family by your side. These are symbolic foods, foods that hold memory. When graphic designer Steve Frykholm was tasked with creating a poster to announce his company’s employee picnic, he relied on these foods to communicate much more than a workplace memo ever could.
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Attention-drawing antics and fun, friendly games have long been a part of the summer picnics attended annually by the thousands of members who make us the UAW's Local 600. / Photo Credit: Photo of UAW Field Day 1948 courtesy of Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University
When you’re observing the Dearborn Truck Plant’s final assembly line during the Ford Rouge Factory Tour, you’re watching a set of skilled operators put finishing touches on all-new Ford F-150s — one is built at the plant every 53 seconds. Those workers are part of UAW Local 600, a unit that’s some 5,000 members strong representing employees from the truck plant, its body shop and paint shop — an electric vehicle center has recently been added too — within the Ford Rouge Complex.
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Created more than 40 years ago, the period kitchens on display in Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation remain a popular visitor draw, transporting observers to another place and time.
Hidden in plain sight in Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation are four period kitchens — the last remaining element of a 1979 museum-wide exhibit upgrade timed to coincide with The Henry Ford’s 50th anniversary. Curators created these kitchen vignettes, representing the late 1700s to the 1930s, to help visitors explore changes through time, putting into context The Henry Ford’s rich collection of over 200 years of household equipment.
These kitchens have staying power. Nearly a half century later, the display continues to resonate with visitors. Not surprising, since kitchens are at the center of activity in a home. They conjure up feelings of security, familiarity, family and friends. Immersive environments like these period kitchens in the museum possess the ability to transport visitors to another place and time. They assist in imagining the lives of people of the past and help us ponder how those experiences relate to our own today.
Continue ReadingMetro Detroit is an area bursting with changemakers — those who break the mold to recreate it in their own image. Simply put: Forging your own path is the Detroit way. It’s also a sentiment actively celebrated within the physical spaces of The Henry Ford as well as instilled through its educational resources accessible online and around the world.
In the city’s culinary and grower worlds, several chefs and organizations are certainly blazing their own trails, working with a fierce passion and fortitude to create more equitable workspaces and, more importantly, more equitable food systems.
Whether it’s a woman-run kitchen where all voices are valued, a restaurant opened by immigrants who refused to fail or a BIPOC-led farm rooted in food sovereignty, thought leaders headquartered right in The Henry Ford’s backyard continue to set their own table when there isn’t a seat for them elsewhere.
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In June 1878, Eadweard Muybridge was hard at work. At the Palo Alto Stock Farm in Stanford, California, the photographer positioned 12 cameras along the side of a racetrack. A wire trailed away from each camera, connected to an electromagnetic circuit. Muybridge was meticulous; he wanted the experiment to work. Leland Stanford, once governor of California, commissioned Muybridge to answer a pressing question: When a horse ran, did all four hooves ever leave the ground?
It was a contentious topic among horse-racing enthusiasts, and Muybridge believed he could settle the matter using one of Stanford’s horses. Losing the horse onto the racetrack, as the animal careened around, it tripped the camera wires. Twelve tiny negatives were the result, capturing the full motion sequence. When Muybridge developed the images, they confirmed that when the horse gathered its legs beneath it, all four hooves left the ground.
Photographs from Muybridge’s series "The Horse in Motion." / Via Wikimedia Commons
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Pyrex, Corning Ware and Corelle: Enduring Kitchen Icons from Corning
Three brands developed by Corning Glass Works during the 20th century — Pyrex, Corning Ware and Corelle — became household names that revolutionized American kitchens and endured decades of changing consumer tastes and expectations.
Corning Glass Works found both industrial and household applications for Pyrex. The company produced Pyrex insulators and laboratory glassware alongside its increasingly popular ovenware in the 1930s. Pyrex Perfect Antenna Insulator, 1930-1939. / THF174626
In 1908, scientists at Corning developed glass that could withstand extreme temperatures. It was initially used for industrial products like railroad lanterns and battery jars. Hoping to broaden the market, Corning spent years testing possible household applications. Encouraged partly by the success of one notable experiment — when Bessie Littleton, whose husband was a Corning researcher, used a modified glass battery jar to bake a cake — Corning introduced Pyrex, a line of temperature-resistant glass cookware. The launch of Pyrex in 1915 inaugurated a new Corning division dedicated to consumer products.
Continue Readingglass, by Jeanine Head Miller, by Charles Sable, 20th century
Illustration by Michael Eugene
Way before the advent of the internet and reality cooking shows, California-born Julia Child was sharing traditional French recipes on her television show The French Chef, which aired from 1963 to 1973.
As a cooking show pioneer, Child was well-loved in America and around the world. A big part of her appeal was the fact that anyone who enjoyed cooking — or eating — could relate to her as a person. She had no airs or graces, and her audience saw her as a humble home cook, spontaneously and excitedly experimenting in the kitchen, sharing her love of food with anyone who wanted to learn. Today Child’s lighthearted, trial-and-error approach to cooking continues to influence cooks in the digital age who are working hard to preserve obscure recipes from the past.
When the internet became mainstream in the early 1990s, the way people shared food and cooking knowledge began to change. Able to receive feedback from fans and critics almost instantaneously, online cooks developed a more interactive and dynamic relationship with their audience, and the content they created sometimes took on a life of its own.
One of Child’s greatest fans was American food writer Julie Powell, who started blogging on the news and opinion website Salon in 2002 about her attempts to cook all the recipes in Julia Child’s book Mastering the Art of French Cooking. In 2005, Powell’s posts were compiled into a cookbook titled Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen. Powell’s journey — which had a profound impact on her own personal growth — was adapted in 2009 into the Nora Ephron-directed film Julie & Julia, starring Amy Adams as Powell and Meryl Streep as Child.
Thankfully, Powell’s legacy, and that of Child, lives on. Today home cooks around the world have adopted their educational and exploratory cooking styles, using different online platforms to raise public awareness about historical recipes, stories, cooking methods and practices.
Through Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, podcasts, websites and newsletters, internet cooks are connecting with a wide audience to preserve foods from the past.
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Illustration by Julie Friedman / Getty Images
The answer lies in understanding what local populations need and finding solutions with zero negative consequences. That’s sustainable. Many argue, however, that the health of the planet and well-being of its residents require a regenerative food system, one that eliminates harmful greenhouse gas emissions caused by chemical- and fossil-fuel-dependent agriculture. At present, agriculture and food processing contribute 30% to emissions that cause global warming. The planet has not been able to naturally sequester these emissions since 1945. A sustainable food system must offset and reverse these factors.
So how do we accomplish this? Ingenious strategies and innovative solutions designed and implemented locally can address the challenge. Models exist. Generations of growers have cultivated fields and tended livestock in tune with local resources. Acequias (engineered irrigation canals) in arid farming areas and terraced fields in mountainous regions confirm some of the strategies adopted over centuries to feed growers and those dependent on growers. Local ingenuity can turn alternative agriculture with little to no synthetic chemical dependence into regenerative agriculture. Yes, growers must play a central role, but customers committed to buying directly from growers at local markets must support the effort too.
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