Alberta, Michigan: Henry Ford’s Northwoods Fordlândia

Most people don’t realize this but early automobiles needed wood almost as much as they needed steel and rubber. Body panels were mounted on wooden frames, and there’s a reason why there are things called floorboards, dashboards, and footboards. A typical Model T was said to consume about 100 board/feet of lumber. Under Henry Ford, Ford Motor Company was about as vertically integrated as companies could be. He didn’t just own steel mills, he owned iron mines for the ore to make steel. He set up his version of utopia, a company town called Fordlândia, to grow rubber in Brazil. It’s not surprising, then, that Ford also grew and milled his own wood, eventually owning about a half million acres of forest in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, along with a couple of industrial scale lumber mills and a factory in Iron Mountain for processing the lumber into wood parts for his cars, bodies for “woodie” station wagons, and eventually military gliders during World War II. That factory was also where what we now know as Kingsford charcoal briquets originated as part of Henry’s zeal to recover just about everything they could from the wood waste.

Ford also built a smaller scale version of Fordlândia in the UP, called Alberta, part of Henry’s “Village Industries” program, wherein he ran small factories to employ farmers off-season. There was a small sawmill built and a town planned, but it never grew beyond a dozen homes. In the 1950s, since FoMoCo was by then using much less wood, the mill, its pumphouse, the town, and about 1,700 acres of woodlands was donated to what is now Michigan Technological University, to use in their lumbering and forestry programs. Eventually it was turned into a conference center with the mill used as a museum. Because of modern notions about visitor safety, the museum was closed and as recently as a couple of years ago MTU was considering tearing it down. Fortunately, students and local history buffs convinced the school to alter its plans.

That’s great because there are very few places in America where you can see an intact 1930s era industrial site with the machinery also in place and still operational.

I drove up to the UP in December to check out the museum, the Glider Museum in Iron Mountain, and the locations of some other Ford operations. I wrote about Alberta for Hagerty here. I’m really grateful that MTU gave me access to document the mill with photography and video.