Posts Tagged by ellice engdahl
One popular line of inquiry received by the Benson Ford Research Center involves Henry Ford’s interest in ensuring a constant and affordable supply of rubber for Ford Motor Company by establishing rubber plantations in Brazil, first at Fordlandia, and then at Belterra. Not surprisingly, our collections hold quite a bit of related material. W.L. Reeves Blakeley led the expedition to find the site that would later become Fordlandia, and, after Ford purchased the tract of 2.5 million acres, supervised the team that did the initial clearing. The W.L. Reeves Blakeley collection at The Henry Ford contains documentation of experiments, test papers, printed material, a few tools, and plant samples—the latter of which we’ve just digitized, including this sample of “maleo caetano” collected in 1931. Visit our digital collections to see all 15 plant samples, along with additional photos of Fordlandia and Belterra.
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford.
South America, nature, Henry Ford, Fordlandia and Belterra, Ford Motor Company, digital collections, by Ellice Engdahl, agriculture, 20th century, 1930s, 1920s
Just Added to Our Digital Collections: 1952 Ferrari 212 Barchetta Images
Something that may not be widely known outside the museum world is how much collaboration and cooperation goes on between cultural heritage institutions. As an example, Matt Anderson, Curator of Transportation at The Henry Ford, was recently approached by the Petersen Automotive Museum about a 1952 Ferrari 212 Barchetta originally given to Henry Ford II by Enzo Ferrari, now in the collections of the Petersen. The Barchetta served as one of the design inspirations for the 1955 Ford Thunderbird, and was exhibited from time to time in the past at special car shows in Henry Ford Museum. When our staff dug into our archives, they found more than two dozen vintage photographs of the car, including this shot showing the sleek lines of the vehicle from the side. We provided these images to the Petersen, which will enhance their curation of this fine vehicle, and in addition have posted them to our digital collections for anyone to access and enjoy.
If you’d like to know more about the Barchetta, you can watch an interview with Petersen chief curator Leslie Kendall and a road test of the car in this episode of Jay Leno’s Garage, or you can check out all of our digitized Barchetta images by visiting our collections website.
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford.
20th century, 1950s, Ford family, digital collections, cars, by Ellice Engdahl
We do a lot of preparatory research in our collections for each episode of our television series, The Henry Ford’s Innovation Nation. Sometimes, we find things that we weren’t expecting. That happened recently, when in investigating material related to food wagons, our registrar Lisa Korzetz recalled an image in our collection of a chuck wagon. Accompanying the chuck wagon photo, we found about a dozen more photographs of the American West in the 19th century, many in the Wyoming Territory, taken by the Dalgliesh Photo Studio and given to The Henry Ford in 1930 by George Dalgliesh, one of the photographers. The photos are an amazing record of everyday cowboy and ranch life in the West, so we’ve digitized all of them, including this image of the romantically named “Robbers Roost Road Ranch.” View all these newly digitized Western images by visiting our collections website.
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford.
Wyoming, 19th century, The Henry Ford's Innovation Nation, photographs, digital collections, by Ellice Engdahl
John Gunsolly operated what is now known as the Gunsolly Carding Mill in Plymouth, Michigan, beginning around 1850. Henry Ford reportedly remembered childhood visits to the mill with his father, delivering wool, and in 1929 he moved the building to Greenfield Village. We’ve just digitized 60 images of the building on its original site and throughout its history in the Village, like this one, showing power loom operation in the building (then called the Plymouth Carding Mill) in 1935. Today, visitors to The Henry Ford can see traditional weaving in action in Liberty Craftworks’ Weaving Shop, itself a former cotton mill. See more images of Gunsolly by visiting our digital collections.
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford.
by Ellice Engdahl, Greenfield Village history, Greenfield Village buildings, Greenfield Village, digital collections
Curator of Public Life Donna Braden has used the phrase “bottomless pit of wonderfulness” to describe The Henry Ford’s collections, because they are so vast and so full of significant artifacts. One downside of the amazing quantity and quality of our holdings is that only a very small percentage are on display on our campus at any given time. However, we are often able to get some of these artifacts out of storage and on public display by loaning them to other museums and institutions. We currently have over 200 artifacts on loan, and about 60 of these can be viewed through our digital collections as well. One such item is this radiation portal monitor, used at Enrico Fermi Atomic Power Plant (Fermi 1), which is on loan to Monroe County Community College in Monroe, Mich., for an exhibit about the plant. See more artifacts related to Fermi 1 (a number of them also on loan), and view thousands of objects, documents, and photographs not currently on public display, by visiting our digital collections.
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford.
One of the most beloved areas of Greenfield Village just celebrated an anniversary: June 29, 2015, marked 30 years since Firestone Farm (both the farmhouse and the barn) was dedicated at The Henry Ford, with luminaries like Gerald Ford, seen here, speaking at the ceremony. Built in 1828, this Ohio farmhouse was where businessman Harvey Firestone was brought up. Today in Greenfield Village, it is a key living history destination, where visitors can see crops being grown, food preparation following 19th century methods, and livestock being raised. As part of our continuing project to digitize material related to Village buildings, we’ve just digitized 185 images from our collections related to Firestone Farm—the cornerstone ceremony, the dedication, and over 100 images of the farm on its original site. View all Firestone Farm–related items by visiting our collections website.
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford.
farms and farming, Greenfield Village buildings, Greenfield Village, digital collections, by Ellice Engdahl
As we gradually work our way through digitizing the vast collections of The Henry Ford, we tackle many projects our staff enjoy: evening gowns, mourning jewelry, and Dave Friedman auto racing photographs, for example, all pose logistical challenges, but we generally look forward to the undertaking. The less glamorous side of digitization, though, is working with objects that are potentially hazardous or unpleasant to handle, like the metal corrosion found on many of the objects we’re remediating as part of our IMLS grant, or a collection of food packaging that had to be emptied and cleaned of decades-old contents. One such project we’ve just completed is material related to the Atari Video Game Burial, in which a struggling Atari, Inc. buried hundreds of thousands of video game cartridges and gaming equipment in a New Mexico landfill in 1983. The Henry Ford’s collection contains photos and other material documenting the excavation of the landfill in 2014, as well as recovered cartridges (like E.T., shown here) and equipment—and even some of the dirt from the landfill. We can now vouch that material recovered from a landfill continues to smell like a landfill for quite some time. View our digitized Atari Burial collection (sans the unpleasant odor) on our collections website now, and watch for an upcoming blog post by Curator of Communication & Information Technology Kristen Gallerneaux to learn more about this material.
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford.
New Mexico, video games, technology, digital collections, by Ellice Engdahl, 21st century, 20th century, 2010s, 1980s
Over about a decade in the early part of the 20th century, a quartet including Henry Ford, inventor Thomas Edison, businessman Harvey Firestone, and naturalist John Burroughs took a series of summer camping trips, sometimes inviting others along for part or all of the journey. The group, calling themselves the Vagabonds, took trips that might not exactly qualify as “roughing it”—they travelled with a caravan of vehicles, a full contingent of service staff, and many comforts of home including furniture and china tableware. We’ve just digitized dozens of photos of the Vagabonds in action, including this photo of the group having breakfast at a large lazy susan–equipped wooden table. View more than 100 photos and artifacts related to the Vagabonds by visiting The Henry Ford’s digital collections.
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford.
summer, photographs, Henry Ford, Firestone family, John Burroughs, Vagabonds, by Ellice Engdahl, digital collections
A little over a year ago, The Henry Ford embarked on a project to digitize material related to John Burroughs (1837–1921), an American naturalist who was good friends with Henry Ford and a member of the Vagabonds (along with Henry, Thomas Edison, and Harvey Firestone). As often happens with our collections, we found more material than we were expecting. Last summer, we reported on the 250 or so items we had digitized at that point; we’re now happy to share that we’ve just wrapped up the project, with nearly 400 total items from our collections digitized. One of the last additions was this photograph of the statue of Burroughs that was installed at Henry Ford’s estate Fair Lane—a sure sign of the esteem in which the naturalist was held by the auto magnate. Browse all of these items—mainly photographs and letters, but also essays, poetry, scrapbooks, periodicals, notebooks, and postcards—in our Digital Collections.
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford.
nature, John Burroughs, digital collections, by Ellice Engdahl
From 1895 to 1924, the Detroit Publishing Company (DPC) created images that helped Americans see the world’s wonders from the comfort of their own homes. They used consumer desire for these images, coupled with determined sales tactics and the technical advantage of the Photochrom process that made lithographs look like color photographs (which did not yet exist), to sell up to 7 million prints annually at the company’s peak. As new technologies developed, DPC lost its competitive edge, and finally declared bankruptcy in 1924. The Henry Ford’s collection of DPC material includes 30,000 vintage photographic prints, 15,000 postcards, and 5,000 color and sepia lithographic prints. We’ve just digitized a representative sampling of these materials, based on selections made by former Curator of Photographs and Prints Cynthia Read Miller and others. The retouched photograph seen here can be compared to the unretouched version and the retouched and colorized version to gain an understanding of the DPC’s multistage process in preparing these images. If you’d like to browse more than 500 items from our DPC collection, including the vivid and visually arresting Photochroms, visit our digital collections.
Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford.
