Henry Ford: Highlights of His Life

Henry Ford spent his early life on a farm. He was born in a small frame house that stood in a grove a few miles from Detroit, near the River Rouge. On each side of the river were the farms of people who had come to the Middle West to get land of their own. Henry's father, William Ford, was one of these early settlers.

The elder Ford came to America from Ireland in 1847, the year of the great potato famine in that country. He made his way to southern Michigan where he found work. At first, he labored on the railroad and then at the arsenal in Dearbornville. Later, he was a "hired hand" on the farm of Patrick O'Hern in Springwells Township. Here William Ford settled down. He purchased forty acres of land, and with his employer, Patrick O'Hern, built a farmhouse. In 1861 he married Mary Litogot, the foster daughter of O'Hern.

Henry Ford, the first son of Mary and William, was born in 1863. Soon there were brothers and sisters. Their life on the farm was a round of doing chores, working in the fields, and taking trips to town. In the winter, the children went to the one-room school over at the "Scotch settlement."

Henry Ford might well have remained on the farm and followed in his father's footsteps. The soil around Dearborn was fertile, and the products of the land found a good market in nearby Detroit, a busy lake port. Although farming meant hard work and long hours, it was an honorable trade. William Ford was not rich, but neither was he poor. He held a position of respect in the community.

But Henry Ford had other ideas. He wanted to have something to do with machinery. He was interested in the tools of the farm rather than in the farm itself. He also tinkered with watches; at the age of thirteen he was repairing the timepieces of his friends. It was a real thrill for him when Fred Reden, a neighbor, brought the first portable steam engine to Dearborn. Henry was permitted to fire its boiler. On the trips to town with his father, he saw other machines, road engines, carding mills, and grist mills.

When Henry finished school at the age of sixteen, he did what thousands of other farmers' sons were doing--he left for the city.

Detroit was a bustling town of one hundred thousand people. It was a commercial center for the Great Lakes shipping trade, and it was also an industrial center. It was to the shops and factories of Detroit that Henry Ford came to learn a trade.

His first job, at the Michigan Car Works, lasted only six days, but he soon found another one at the machine shop of James Flowers and Bros., where he became a machinist's apprentice. In this shop he learned about engines, and about the tools and machines that made parts for other machines. At night he repaired watches in the jewelry shop of James Magill. A few months later, he left the Flowers' shop to work at the Dry Dock Engine Company where he had greater opportunity to learn about steam engines. When his apprenticeship was over, he became Henry Ford, the machinist.

Instead of continuing to work at his trade in the shops of Detroit, he went back to Dearborn. William Ford lent his son eighty acres of timbered land, and Henry Ford set up a saw mill. During the harvesting season, he operated an engine for a group of threshers. He also found time to travel about southern Michigan repairing Westinghouse portable steam engines.