Village industries
Henry Ford's Village Industries were small factories located in rural areas of Michigan. Ford developed his Village Industries in part to provide farm workers a stable source of income during the winter months.
Ford strongly felt that there were many positive aspects to rural life. At the same time, he recognized that the promise of high wages was encouraging young people to discard the agrarian life of their parents and move to the cities. The spreading of industrialization (due in part, Ford knew, to his very own factory system) was making farming less attractive and giving farmers less to do in the winter. Ford developed the village industries program as a way to bring manufacturing jobs to the countryside, allowing residents to reap the economic advantages without giving up their agricultural heritage. His village industries were intended to strengthen rural communities by providing jobs to unemployed and under-employed local residents, allowing farmers to work in the winter and return to farming in the summer. It was also, in a very real sense, intended to maintain the bucolic settings and lifestyles that Ford remembered from his boyhood and idealized to some extent.
Ford wanted to create places where technology, manufacturing, and agriculture could co-exist. He established his village industries in rural areas where farmland was easily available. However, Ford intended the village industries to be an integral part of his manufacturing system, providing cost-effective and reliable parts. To minimize the increased costs of transportation incurred by these decentralized manufacturing plants, Ford chose sites that were primarily near larger existing Ford plants (the Ford River Rouge Complex and the Highland Park Ford Plant). The products the village industries made were all small and light, able to be efficiently shipped.
Ford also believed in using clean and readily-available sources of power. Water power, he thought, was nearly inexhaustible and easy to come by in Michigan. He had in fact begun experimenting with water power when building his house at Fair Lane. Thus, the village industry plants all made use of hydroelectric power; indeed, many were located at the site of old mills. Some of the village industry plants actually utilize refurbished grist mill buildings, others merely used the site, with Ford erecting new industrial buildings to house the plant.
After World War I, Henry Ford began a program of decentralizing his manufacturing efforts away from Detroit and Dearborn, Michigan, establishing plants in other areas of Michigan and across the country. Ford felt that decentralization held many advantages, in particular that managing the comings and goings of a large number of employees at any one site became problematic. One part of this plan was the establishment of small rural manufacturing plants knows as "village industries." The village industries reflected Ford's vision of decentralization: not merely locating factories in different cities or regions of the country, but taking specific production tasks out of the larger factories and moving them to small rural factories.
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