📍Corner of Ford Road and Greenfield Road, Dearborn, Michigan 48126, USA
1863 – 1876“I was born on a farm near Dearborn, Michigan in 1863, the eldest of six children of William Ford, an Irish immigrant farmer, and Mary Litogot Ford. The farm gave me a practical education in machinery and mechanics — I was fixing watches and farm equipment from childhood, and the repetitive labour of farming gave me an early conviction that machines should do the work that humans found exhausting and demeaning. I left the farm for Detroit at sixteen and never returned to farming, though I bought it back later and preserved it. The farmhouse and the fields and the particular quality of Michigan light and Michigan cold were always present in my imagination as the alternative to what I was building — the world of the farm that the automobile was going to transform, for better and worse, in ways I understood only partially.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today
Sources: Watts, S. The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century (2005), Knopf; Ford, H. My Life and Work (1922), Doubleday; Brinkley, D. Wheels for the World: Henry Ford, His Company, and a Century of Progress (2003)