Henry Ford's Own Story

It was a hot, sultry day in the last of July, one of those Eastern summer days when the air presses heavily down on the stifling country fields, and in every farmyard the chickens scratch deep on the shady side of buildings, looking for cool earth to lie upon, panting.

"This weather won't hold long," William Ford said that morning, giving the big bay a friendly slap and fastening the trace as she stepped over. "We'd better get the hay under cover before night."

There was no sign of a cloud in the bright, hot sky, but none of the hired men disputed him. William Ford was a good farmer, thrifty and weather-wise. Every field of his 300-acre farm was well cared for, yielding richly every year; his cattle were fat and sleek, his big red barns the best filled in the neighborhood. He was not the man to let ten acres of good timothy-and-clover hay get caught in a summer shower and spoil.

They put the big hay-rack on the wagon, threw in the stone water jugs, filled with cool water from the well near the kitchen door, and drove out to the meadow. One imagines them working there, lifting great forksful of the clover-scented hay, tossing them into the rack, where, on the rising mound, the youngest man was kept busy shifting and settling them with his fork. Grasshoppers whirred up from the winrows of the dried grass when they were disturbed, and quails called from the fence corners.

Now and then the men stopped to wipe the sweat from their foreheads and to take long swallows from the water jugs, hidden, for coolness, under a mound of hay. Then, with a look at the sky, they took up their forks.

William Ford worked with the others, doing a good day's task with the best of them, and proud of it. He was the owner, and they were the hired men, but on a Michigan farm the measure of a man is the part he takes in man's work. In the cities, where men work against men, let them build up artificial distinctions; on the farm the fight is against nature, and men stand shoulder to shoulder in it. A dark cloud was coming up in the northwest, and every man's muscles leaped to the need for getting in the hay.

Suddenly they heard a clang from the great bell, hung high on a post in the home dooryard, and used only for calling in the men at dinnertime or for some emergency alarm. Every man stopped. It was only 10 o'clock. Then they saw a fluttering apron at the barnyard gate, and William Ford dropped his fork.

"I'll go. Get in the hay!" he called back, already running over the stubble in long strides. The men stared a minute longer and then turned back to work, a little more slowly this time, with the boss gone. A few minutes later they stopped again to watch him riding out of the home yard and down the road, urging the little gray mare to a run.

"Going for Doc Hall," they surmised. They got in a few more loads of hay before the rain came, spattering in big drops on their straw hats and making a pleasant rustling on the thirsty meadows. Then they climbed into the half-filled rack and drove down to the big barn.

They sat idly there in the dimness, watching through the wide doors the gray slant of the rain. The doctor had come; one of the men unhitched his horse and led it into a stall, while another pulled the light cart under the shed. Dinner time came and passed. There was no call from the house, and they did not go in. Once in a while they laughed nervously, and remarked that it was a shame they did not save the last three loads of hay. Good hay, too, ran a full four tons to the acre.

About 2 o'clock in the afternoon the rain changed to a light drizzle and the clouds broke. Later William Ford came out of the house and crossed the soppy yard. He was grinning a little. It was all right, he said-a boy.

I believe they had up a jug of sweet cider from the cellar in honor of the occasion. I know that when they apologetically mentioned the spoiled hay he laughed heartily and asked what they supposed he cared about the hay.

"What're you going to call him, Ford?" one of the men asked him as they stood around the cider jug, wiping their lips on the backs of their hands.

"The wife's named him already-Henry," he said.

"Well, he'll have his share of one of the finest farms in Michigan one of these days," they said, and while William Ford said nothing he must have looked over his green rolling acres with a pardonable pride, reflecting that the new boy-baby need never want for anything in reason.

Henry was the second son of William Ford and Mary Litogot Ford, his energetic, wholesome Holland Dutch wife. While he was still in pinafores, tumbling about the house or making daring excursions into the barnyard, the stronghold of the dreadful turkey gobbler, his sister, Margaret, was born, and Henry had barely been promoted to real trousers, at the age of four, when another brother arrived.

Four babies, to be bathed, clothed, taught, loved and guarded from all the childish disasters to be encountered about the farm, might well be thought enough to fill any woman's mind and hands, but there were a thousand additional tasks for the mistress of that large household.

There was milk to skim, butter and cheese to make, poultry and garden to be tended, patchwork quilts to sew, and later to fasten into the quilting frames and stitch by hand in herringbone or fan patterns. The hired hands must be fed-twenty or thirty of them in harvesting time; pickles, jams, jellies, sweet cider, vinegar must be made and stored away on the cellar shelves. When the hogs were killed in the fall there were sausages, head-cheese, pickled pigs' feet to prepare, hams and shoulders to be soaked in brine and smoked; onions, peppers, popcorn to be braided in long strips and hung in the attic; while every day bread, cake and pies must be baked, and the house kept in that "apple-pie order" so dear to the pride of the Michigan farmers' women-folk.

All these tasks Mary Ford did, or superintended, efficiently, looking to the ways of her household with all the care and pride her husband had in managing the farm. She found time, too, to be neighborly, to visit her friends, care for one of them who fell ill, help any one in the little community who needed it. And always she watched over the health and manners of the children.

In this environment Henry grew. He was energetic, interested in everything, from the first. His misadventures in conquering the turkey gobbler would fill a chapter. When he was a little older one of the hired men would put him on the back of a big farm horse and let him ride around the barnyard, or perhaps he was allowed to carry a spiced drink of vinegar and water to the men working in the harvest field. He learned every corner of the hay-mow, and had a serious interview with his father over the matter of sliding down the straw-stacks. In the winters, wrapped in a knit muffler, with mittens of his mother's making on his hands, he played in the snow or spent whole afternoons sliding on the ice with his brothers.

Best of all he liked the "shop," where the blacksmith work for the farm was done and the sharpening of tools. When the weather was bad outside his father or one of the men lighted the charcoal in the forge and Henry might pull the bellows till the fire glowed and the iron buried in it shone white-hot. Then the sparks flew from the anvil while the great hammer clanged on the metal, shaping it, and Henry begged to be allowed to try it himself, just once. In time he was given a small hammer of his own.

So the years passed until Henry was 11 years old, and then a momentous event occurred-small enough in itself, but to this day one of the keenest memories of his childhood.

This first memorable event of Henry Ford's childhood occurred on a Sunday in the spring of his eleventh year.

In that well-regulated household Sunday, as a matter of course, was a day of stiffly starched, dressed-up propriety for the children, and of custom-enforced idleness for the elders. In the morning the fat driving horses, brushed till their glossy coats shone in the sun, were hitched to the two-seated carriage, and the family drove to church. William and Mary Ford were Episcopalians, and Henry was reared in that faith, although both then and later he showed little enthusiasm for church-going.

Sitting through the long service in the stuffy little church, uncomfortably conscious of his Sunday-best garments, sternly forbidden to "fidget," while outside were all the sights and sounds of a country spring must have seemed a wanton waste of time to small Henry. To this day he has not greatly changed that opinion.

"Religion, like everything else, is a thing that should be kept working," he says. "I see no use in spending a great deal of time learning about heaven and hell. In my opinion, a man makes his own heaven and hell and carries it around with him. Both of them are states of mind."

On this particular Sunday morning Henry was more than usually rebellious. It was the first week he had been allowed to leave off his shoes and stockings for the summer, and Henry had all a country boy's ardor for "going barefoot." To cramp his joyously liberated toes again into stuffy, leather shoes seemed to him an outrage. He resented his white collar, too, and the immaculate little suit his mother cautioned him to keep clean. He was not sullen about it. He merely remarked frankly that he hated their old Sunday, anyhow, and wished never to see another.

Mother and father and the four children set out for church as usual. At the hitching posts, where William Ford tied the horses before going in to the church, they met their neighbors, the Bennetts. Will Bennett, a youngster about Henry's age, hailed him from the other carriage.

"Hi, Hen! C'm'ere! I got something you ain't got!"

Henry scrambled out over the wheel and hurried to see what it might be. It was a watch, a real watch, as large and shiny as his father's. Henry looked at it with awed admiration, and then with envy. It was Will's own watch; his grandfather had given it to him.

On a strict, cross-your-heart promise to give it back, Henry was allowed to take it in his hands. Then he cheered up somewhat.

"That ain't much!" he scornfully remarked. "It ain't runnin'!" At the same moment a dazzling idea occurred to him. He had always wanted to see the insides of a watch.

"I bet I c'n fix it for you," he declared.

A few minutes later, when Mary Ford looked for Henry, he was nowhere to be found. Will was also missing. When, after services, they had not appeared, the parents became worried. They searched. Inquiries and explorations failed to reveal the boys.

They were in the Bennetts' farm "shop," busy with the watch. Having no screw-driver small enough, Henry made one by filing a shingle nail. Then he set to work and took out every screw in the mechanism.

The works came out of the case, to the accompaniment of an agonized protest from Will; the cogs fell apart, the springs unwound. Altogether it was a beautiful disorder, enough to delight any small boy.

"Now look what you've went and done!" cried Will, torn between natural emotion over the disaster to his watch and admiration of Henry's daring.

"Well, you SAID you was goin' ta put it together," he reminded that experimenter many times in the next few hours.

Dinner time came, and Will, recalling the fried chicken, dumplings, puddings, cakes, of the Sunday dinner, grew more than restless, but Henry held him there by the sheer force of his enthusiasm. The afternoon wore along, and he was still investigating those fascinating gears and springs.

When at last outraged parental authority descended upon the boys, Henry's Sunday clothes were a wreck, his hands and face were grimy, but he had correctly replaced most of the screws, and he passionately declared that if they would only leave him alone he would have the watch running in no time.

Family discipline was strict in those days. Undoubtedly Henry was punished, but he does not recall that now. What he does remember vividly is the passion for investigating clocks and watches that followed. In a few months he had taken apart and put together every timepiece on the place, excepting only his father's watch.

"Every clock in the house shuddered when it saw me coming," he says. But the knowledge he acquired was more than useful to him later, when at sixteen he faced the problem of making his own living in Detroit.

In those days farm life had no great appeal for him. There were plenty of chores to be done by an active boy of 12 on that farm, where every bit of energy was put to some useful purpose. He drove up the cows at night, kept the kitchen wood-box filled, helped to hitch and unhitch the horses, learned to milk and chop kindling. He recalls that his principal objection to such work was that it was always interrupting some interesting occupation he had discovered for himself in the shop. He liked to handle tools, to make something. The chores were an endless repetition of the same task, with no concrete object created.

In the winter he went to the district school, walking two miles and back every day through the snow, and enjoying it. He did not care for school especially, although he got fair marks in his studies, and was given to helping other boys "get their problems." Arithmetic was easy for him. His mind was already developing its mechanical trend.

"I always stood well with the teacher," he says with a twinkle. "I found things ran more smoothly that way." He was not the boy to create unnecessary friction in his human relations, finding it as wasteful of energy there as it would have been in any of the mechanical contrivances he made. He "got along pretty well" with every one, until the time came to fight, and then he fought, hard and quick.

Under his leadership, for he was popular with the other boys, the Greenfield school saw strange things done. Henry liked to play as well as any boy, but somehow in his thrifty ancestry there had been developed a strong desire to have something to show for time spent. Swimming, skating and the like were all very well until he had thoroughly learned them, but why keep on after that? Henry wanted to do something else then. And as for spending a whole afternoon batting a ball around, that seemed to him a foolish occupation.

Accordingly, he constructed a working forge in the schoolyard, and he and his crowd spent every recess and noon during one autumn working at it. There, with the aid of a blow-pipe, they melted every bottle and bit of broken glass they could find and recast them into strange shapes. It was Henry, too, who devised the plan of damming the creek that ran near the schoolhouse, and by organizing the other boys into regular gangs, with a subforeman for each, accomplished the task so thoroughly and quickly that he had flooded two acres of potatoes before an outraged farmer knew what was happening.

But these occupations, absorbing enough for the time being, did not fill his imagination. Henry already dreamed of bigger things. He meant, some day, to be a locomotive engineer. When he saw the big, black engines roaring across the Michigan farm lands, under their plumes of smoke, and when he caught a glimpse of the sooty man in overalls at the throttle, he felt an ambitious longing. Some day--!

It was on the whole a busy, happy childhood, spent for the most part out of doors. Henry grew freckled, sunburned the skin from his nose and neck in the swimming pool, scratched his bare legs on blackberry briars. He learned how to drive horses, how to handle a hay fork or a hoe, how to sharpen and repair the farm tools. The "shop" was the most interesting part of the farm to him; it was there he invented and manufactured a device for opening and closing the farm gates without getting down from the wagon.

Then, when he was 14, an event occurred which undoubtedly changed the course of his life. Mary Ford died.

When Mary Ford died the heart of the home went with her. "The house was like a watch without a mainspring," her son says. William Ford did his best, but it must have been a pathetic attempt, that effort of the big, hardworking farmer to take a mother's place to the four children.

For a time a married aunt came in and managed the household, but she was needed in her own home and soon went back to it. Then Margaret, Henry's youngest sister, took charge, and tried to keep the house in order and superintend the work of "hired girls" older than herself. She was "capable"-that good New England word so much more expressive than "efficient"-but no one could take Mary Ford's place in that home.

There was now nothing to hold Henry on the farm. He had learned how to do the farm work, and the little attraction it had had for him was gone; thereafter every task was merely a repetition. His father did not need his help; there were always the hired men. I suppose any need William Ford may have felt for the companionship of his second son was unexpressed. In matters of emotion the family is not demonstrative.

The boy had exhausted the possibilities of the farm shop. His last work in it was the building of a small steam-engine. For this, helped partly by pictures, partly by his boyish ingenuity, he made his own patterns, his own castings, did his own machine work.

His material was bits of old iron, pieces of wagon tires, stray teeth from harrows-anything and everything from the scrap pile in the shop which he could utilize in any imaginable way. When the engine was finished Henry mounted it on an improvised chassis which he had cut down from an old farm wagon, attached it by a direct drive to a wheel on one side, something like a locomotive connecting-rod, and capped the whole with a whistle which could be heard for miles.

When he had completed the job he looked at the result with some natural pride. Sitting at the throttle, tooting the ear-splitting whistle, he charged up and down the meadow lot at nearly ten miles an hour, frightening every cow on the place. But after all his work, for some reason the engine did not please him long. Possibly the lack of enthusiasm with which it was received disappointed him.

In the technical journals which he read eagerly during his sixteenth winter, he learned about the big iron works of Detroit, saw pictures of machines he longed to handle.

Early the next spring, when the snow had melted, and every breeze that blew across the fields was an invitation to begin something new, Henry started to school as usual one morning, and did not return.

Detroit is only a few miles from Greenfield. Henry made the journey on the train that morning, and while his family supposed him at school and the teacher was marking a matter-of-fact "absent" after his name, he had already set about his independent career.

He had made several trips to Detroit in the past, but this time the city looked very different to him. It had worn a holiday appearance before, but now it seemed stern and busy-a little too busy, perhaps, to waste much attention on a country boy of sixteen looking for a job.

Nevertheless, he whistled cheerfully enough to himself, and started briskly through the crowds. He knew what he wanted, and he was going straight for it.

"I always knew I would get what I went after," he says. "I don't recall having any very great doubts or fears."

At that time the shop of James Flower and Company, manufacturers of steam engines and steam engine appliances, was one of Detroit's largest factories. Over one hundred men were employed there, and their output was one to be pointed to with pride by boastful citizens.

Henry Ford's nerves, healthy and steady as they were, tingled with excitement when he entered the place. He had read of it, and had even seen a picture of it, but now he beheld for himself its size and the great number of machines and men. This was something big, he said to himself.

After a moment he asked a man working near where he could find the foreman.

"Over there-the big fellow in the red shirt," the man replied. Henry hurried over and asked for a job.

The foreman looked at him and saw a slight, wiry country boy who wanted work. There was nothing remarkable about him, one supposes. The foreman did not perceive immediately, after one look into his steady eye, that this was no ordinary lad, as foremen so frequently do in fiction. Instead, he looked Henry over, asked him a question or two, remembered that a big order had just come in and he was short of hands.

"Well, come to work to-morrow. I'll see what you can do," he said. "Pay you two and a half a week."

"All right, sir," Henry responded promptly, but the foreman had already turned his back and forgotten him. Henry, almost doubtful of his good fortune, hurried away before the foreman should change his mind.

Outside in the sunshine he pushed his cap on the back of his head, thrust his hands deep into his pockets, jingling the silver in one of them, and walked down the street, whistling. The world looked like a good place to him. No more farming for Henry Ford. He was a machinist now, with a job in the James Flower shops.

Before him there unrolled a bright future. He was ambitious; he did not intend always to remain a mechanic. One day when he had learned all there was to know about the making of steam engines, he intended to drive one himself. He would be a locomotive engineer, nothing less.

Meantime there were practical questions of food and shelter to consider immediately and he was not the boy to waste time in speculations for the future when there was anything to be done. He counted his money. Almost four dollars, and a prospect of two and a half every week. Then he set out to find a boarding house.

Two dollars and a half a week, not a large living income, even in 1878. Henry walked a long time looking for a landlady who would consent to board a healthy sixteen-year-old mechanic for that sum. It was late that afternoon before he found one who, after some hesitation, agreed to do it. Then he looked at the small, dirty room she showed him, at her untidy, slatternly person, and decided that he would not live there. He came out into the street again.

Henry was facing the big problem. How was he to live on an income too small? Apparently his mind went, with the precision of a machine, directly to the answer.

"When your reasonable expenses exceed your income, increase your income." Simple. He knew that after he had finished his day's work at the shops there would be a margin of several hours a day left to him. He would have to turn them into money. That was all.

He returned to a clean boarding house he had visited earlier in the day, paid three dollars and a half in advance for one week's board, and ate a hearty supper. Then he went to bed.