Mythologies of an American everyday landscape : Henry Ford at the Wayside Inn

Abstract

Ford purchased property in 1923 in Sudbury, Massachusetts in order to preserve an historic inn associated with the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Over the next twenty years, his mission expanded to create an idealized New England landscape and a way of living on the land representative of an American identity. This study will demonstrate that this change of intention is one which elevates a notion of collective memory over that of heroic history. It will also show that Ford's endeavor at the Wayside Inn represented not only his own private dialogue with a cultural landscape, but also was emblematic of a broader public engagement with the crafting of what it meant to be American in the early twentieth century. Finally, this investigation will illuminate Ford's collection of the American experience as an attempt to grapple with how to make an American community (both physical and social) that embraced American traditions and technological innovations without the latter obliterating the former.