Henry Ford's Village Industries were small factories located in rural areas of Michigan. Ford developed his Village Industries in part to provide farm workers a stable source of income during the winter months.
Philosophy Ford strongly felt that there were many positive aspects to rural life. At the same time, he recognized that the promise of high wages was encouraging young people to discard the agrarian life of their parents and move to the cities. The spreading of industrialization (due in part, Ford knew, to his very own factory system) was making farming less attractive and giving farmers less to do in the winter. Ford developed the village industries program as a way to bring manufacturing jobs to the countryside, allowing residents to reap the economic advantages without giving up their agricultural heritage. His village industries were intended to strengthen rural communities by providing jobs to unemployed and under-employed local residents, allowing farmers to work in the winter and return to farming in the summer. It was also, in a very real sense, intended to maintain the bucolic settings and lifestyles that Ford remembered from his boyhood and idealized to some extent.
Ford wanted to create places where technology, manufacturing, and agriculture could co-exist. He established his village industries in rural areas where farmland was easily available. However, Ford intended the village industries to be an integral part of his manufacturing system, providing cost-effective and reliable parts. To minimize the increased costs of transportation incurred by these decentralized manufacturing plants, Ford chose sites that were primarily near larger existing Ford plants (the Ford River Rouge Complex and the Highland Park Ford Plant). The products the village industries made were all small and light, able to be efficiently shipped.
Ford also believed in using clean and readily-available sources of power. Water power, he thought, was nearly inexhaustible and easy to come by in Michigan. He had in fact begun experimenting with water power when building his house at Fair Lane. Thus, the village industry plants all made use of hydroelectric power; indeed, many were located at the site of old mills. Some of the village industry plants actually utilize refurbished grist mill buildings, others merely used the site, with Ford erecting new industrial buildings to house the plant.
History After World War I, Henry Ford began a program of decentralizing his manufacturing efforts away from Detroit and Dearborn, Michigan, establishing plants in other areas of Michigan and across the country. Ford felt that decentralization held many advantages, in particular that managing the comings and goings of a large number of employees at any one site became problematic. One part of this plan was the establishment of small rural manufacturing plants known as "village industries." The village industries reflected Ford's vision of decentralization: not merely locating factories in different cities or regions of the country, but taking specific production tasks out of the larger factories and moving them to small rural factories.
In 1918, Ford made his first purchase of a village industry site when he bought Nankin Mills (now part of Westland, Michigan) on the Rouge River. Nankin Mills was in fact familiar to Ford: as a boy he had travelled with his father to the site to grind grain. In 1919, Ford made his second purchase on the Rouge: an old gristmill in Northville, Michigan. The site was again familiar to Ford: he had spent his honeymoon in Northville. Ford planned on building more sites, and so forged an agreement with the Wayne County Road Commission, where the commission would build hydro dams along the Rouge for Ford's use, in return for receiving the land (and eventually the mills) that Ford had purchased. Ford eventually built six of his village industries at mill sites along the Rouge River.
Ford reconfigured the Northville property into a valve manufacturing facility by moving machinery in from the Fordson and Highland Park plants. The Northville Ford Valve Plant was the first village industry to open, in 1919–20. Meanwhile, Ford converted Nankin Mills into a small factory, and in 1920, workers began producing screws.
More plants were quickly opened, with three more village industries in Phoenix, Plymouth, and Waterford by 1925. After that, there was something of a lull in the village industry program, with only two new plants, in Flat Rock and Ypsilanti, opened in the next ten years. However, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Ford moved to rapidly expand the village industry concept, opening plants in Tecumseh, Newburg, Dundee, Brooklyn, Saline, Milan, Milford, Sharon Hollow, Willow Run, and Manchester. many of these plants, opening in the middle of the Great Depression, had a profound economic effect on the community, employing dozens or hundreds of workers who would otherwise have been unemployed or have moved away. During World War II, three more plants, at Hayden Mills, Cherry Hill, and Clarkston, were constructed.
However, the village industry program did not live much longer than Henry Ford himself. The small manufacturing plants were not a financial success, and the stricter accountability procedures implemented after Henry Ford relinquished the presidency in 1945 found that they did not return optimal cost/benefit ratios. Ford Motor Company soon began closing the Village Industries; most of the plants were closed in the 1940s. Only five were still operating in the mid-1950s, three in the mid-1960s, and only a single one, the Ford Valve Plant in Northville, in the mid-1970s. The Northville plant, ironically both the first and last of Ford's village industries, continued in operation until 1981.
List of sites There was never a canonical list of sites included in the village industries program, and it is not always clear from the scale, siting, or establishment date of a particular factory whether the site should be considered a "village industry" or simply a small factory. Ford Motor Company itself says that "more than 30 Village Industries plants sprouted throughout Michigan, Ohio, Mississippi, New York and other states." However, contemporaneous accounts describe village industries as being confined to "different points within a 50 mile radius of Dearborn."
Thus, many contemporary historians limit consideration to the 18 or 20 sites in southern Michigan that Ford established primarily in the 1920s and 1930s. The following list of sites comes from Howard P. Segal, author of the book Recasting the machine age: Henry Ford's village industries, who lists 19 separate sites. Other historians use a substantially similar list; for example, Mullin includes the same 19 sites, but deprecates Nankin Mills, which he describes as "not actually part of the Village Industries," but "set[ting] the tone for the decentralized village factories that followed.
Northville site
The Northville plant is located at 235 East Main Street in Northville, Michigan. The site was originally a gristmill built in 1825 and renovated in 1896. A second gristmill was built on this site by the Yerkes family, and later a sawmill was built by the Dubar family.
Henry Ford purchased the old gristmill located at this site in 1919. He reconfigured the mill into a valve manufacturing facility by moving machinery in from the Fordson and Highland Park plants, and opened it as the first of the village industries in 1920. Between 1920 and 1936, the plant manufactured over 180 million valves, at a cost of less than half what it would be in the larger Highland Park plant.
In 1936, Ford replaced the mill with an Albert Kahn-designed factory building. The building reflects the then-current industrial architecture, as well as hints of Art Deco in the brickwork and entryway styling but still incorporated a water wheel. With the new building, as many as 400 people were employed at the Northville plant. The factory continued to produce valves after the Village Industries program was discontinued in 1947. The building was enlarged in 1956, and in 1969 over 150,000 valves were produced every day. The plant continued operations until 1981, the longest lived of any former Village Industries factory. It reopened in 1982 to manufacture shipping racks and gas tanks, but operations were discontinued for good in 1989.
The building was later sold. The building has been renovated into office space for use by design firms. The land surrounding the building is a town park, in part containing "Mill Race Village," an outdoor museum of restored buildings. The valve plant was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1995.
Nankin Mills site
The Nankin Mills site is located at 33175 Ann Arbor Trail in Westland, Michigan. The first mill on this site was constructed in 1835–42; that mill burned some time during the Civil War. The second mill was constructed in 1863 by Samuel Hardenbergh. In 1887, Hardenbergh sold the mill to Martin Lewis, and at a later date was purchased by Floyd Bassett.
The mill was eventually purchased by Henry Ford in 1918 from Bassett. Ford converted the building into a small factory, and in 1920, twelve workers began producing screws for Ford. It was the second Village Industry to open, after the Ford Valve Plant in Northville. In 1927, Ford converted the site to make engravings and stencils, and in 1937 a new building was constructed at the site. Eventually it employed 70 people.
The plant closed in 1948, after which Ford donated the site to the Wayne County Road Commission. The commission remodeled the mill, and in 1956 it was opened as a nature center. It was designated a Michigan State Historic Site in 1967; in the mid-1980s, Nankin Mills became the headquarters of the Wayne County Park System. An addition was built in 1999, and in 2001 the original mill reopened as an interpretive center. The mill was designated a state of Michigan historic site in 1967, and a historical marker is placed at this site.
Phoenix Mill site
The Phoenix Mill is located on the Rouge River, at 14973 Northville Road (at Edward N. Hines Drive) in Plymouth Township. It is the site of the former village of Phoenix. Phoenix was founded in 1837, and flourished only until about 1880. The mill located at this site was built in 1840 and burned in 1905.
Ford purchased the site of the mill in 1919, and according to the blue prints, utilized his Dearborn Realty and Construction Company to design and build the mill. It is a commonly held myth that Albert Kahn designed Phoenix Mill. A list of projects conducted by the Albert Kahn firm for Henry Ford that is held at the Benson Ford Research Center reveals that the only work the Kahn Firm conducted at Phoenix Mill was a sewer study. The plant was built, but the opening was delayed when the mill dam collapsed in 1921 and had to be reconstructed. The plant opened in 1922, employing exclusively women workers from Ford's Highland Park plant. The Phoenix plant was notable in that Ford paid the women workers high wages, equal to those of male workers, a rarity in the 1920s. The workers, however, were required to be single and childless, and to be properly attired in dresses, stockings and heels.
At its peak 148 women were employed at the Phoenix Mill. The site originally produced generator cutouts; in 1940 the line was changed to produce voltage regulators for V8 engines. During World War II, the plant made parts for B-24 bombers. The Phoenix Mill plant closed in 1948, and Ford turned it over to the Wayne County Road Commission, who used it as a maintenance yard. The mill was designated a state of Michigan historic site in 1989. A Michigan Women's Museum was later planned for the site, but had not materialized.
Flat Rock site