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In the fall of 1926 Henry Ford paid a visit to Mr. and Mrs. Willis Tripp of Tipton, Michigan, sixty miles or so southwest of Dearborn by the DetroitChicago road. Ford dropped by the farm with a group of friends and associates to look over a steam-driven sawmill built about seventy-five years previously by Mr. Tripp's grandfather, the Reverend Henry Tripp. According to a brief report in the Adrian Daily Telegraph, Ford was intrigued by a number of items in the family's possession-a Howe sewing machine, the reverend's hickory cane, a pair of ice skates-but it was the mill, built by a man who had died eleven days before Ford's own birthday, that really interested him.
The accompanying picture is one of several documentary photographs taken after Ford decided to acquire the mill and move it to Greenfield Village. The camera is facing north. To the left is the brick setting for the mill's boiler (the jutting pipe is a boiler drain). Straight ahead is a makeshift bench for the boiler operator (the fire door of the return flue boiler is at the far end of the setting). A narrow stairway giving access to the upper floor of the mill is just visible to the right of the bench. The mill's power source, a 15-horsepower horizontal box-bed steam engine, sits out of sight on the other side of the boiler, as does the muley saw's drive mechanism. Right behind the photographer is a hand pump for a well. The door on the right opens onto farm fields bordered by woodland.
This was a modest yet sophisticated installation. The Tripps...