Dearborn - Henry Ford Museum & Greenfield Village

11 mi. west of the city centre is the suburb of Dearborn, in which the automobile manufacturer Henry Ford was born. Here in 1929 he established two exhibition complexes as memorials to himself: the Henry Ford Museum (area 12 acres) and an open-air museum, Greenfield Village.

The Henry Ford Museum offers a general survey of the development of American life and technological advances from pioneering days to the present time.

These include the Decorative Arts Galleries, a series of rooms decorated in appropriate period style showing the development of American decorative and applied art, a reconstruction of an early 19th c. street, with different shops and workshops, and the Main Exhibition Hall.

Main Exhibition Hall is devoted to the history of technology in the United States. Among the most notable exhibits are George Stephenson's first steam locomotive (1829); some 200 automobiles, including the first Ford and the car in which John F. Kennedy was assassinated; the Fokker in which Admiral Byrd made the first flight over the North Pole in 1926; and the Junkers W 33 in which Hermann Kohl, Freiherr von Hanefeld and James Fitzmaurice made the first east-west crossing of the Atlantic in 1928.

A little way north of the Henry Ford Museum is the entrance to Greenfield Village, an open-air museum with some 100 historic buildings of the 18th and 19th centuries from all over the United States. Among them, in addition to different types of houses, are a school, a railroad station and other public buildings, the house in which Henry Ford was born, Edison's laboratory and the Wright brothers' bicycle factory. The numerous shops in the Village Craft Center sell the products of the various workshops in the village.

Legendary cars from all over the world are displayed here, to the delight of all enthusiasts.