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Where was Henry Ford's first factory?
I’m neck-deep in a heated debate with my mother-in-law—we’re currently on a water break because she “gets flushed” when engaged in full-throated intellectual duels—about the origins of the Ford Motor Company. She maintains that Henry Ford’s first factory was in Highland Park, but I keep telling her that no, it was Piquette Street! Please settle this once and for all—where was Ford’s first factory?
Jason Tushinski · Updated on
Reviewed by Shannon Martin, Licensed Insurance Agent.
Well, you’re both wrong—the Ford Motor Company’s first factory was the Mack Avenue Plant in Detroit, Michigan where Ford’s first production car, the Model A, was assembled in July 1903. However, that’s not the entire story.
Technically speaking, Henry Ford’s first factory was the workshop behind his Detroit-area home, where he assembled his first experimental car in 1896. No doubt his neighbors must have been annoyed with all that banging, crashing, clanking, cranking, riveting, and hollering going on.
We’re also certain that Ford’s son Edsel, who would later become president of the Ford Motor Company, was of zero use to his father in building that experimental car back in 1896. Granted, Edsel was three years old at the time, but when your father is attempting to revolutionize society, you pitch in.
Anyways, only after the Ford Motor Company was formed did the company occupy its first real factory on Mack Avenue. Five years later, in 1908, the famous Model T rolled off the line at Ford’s second factory, on Piquette Street.
By this time, Ford knew he was onto something (irritable neighbors be damned), so he had already purchased a huge tract of land in Highland Park, where a 60-acre plant would be built. Production began there in 1910, and Ford would discover its mass-production mojo in 1913, when it began producing thousands of Model Ts a day, forever transforming the country in the process.
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