Collecting Rural Industry: Interwar Networks Committed to Finding the “Firsts”

Henry Ford’s automobiles and tractors transformed rural and farm life. Ford wanted to influence people’s memories of the past as much as his industrial products changed their lives. He relied on a network of antique dealers to build a strong collection of agricultural and rural industrial “firsts.”

Ford’s zeal for collecting fit within larger societal trends. Support for local history, including agricultural history, gained traction during the first decade of the 1900s, as urban populations grew. The American Historical Association organized the Conference of State and Local Historical Societies and state historical society administrators helped form the Mississippi Valley Historical Association, now the OAH. The Agricultural History Society formed in 1919, and members joined the pro-museum movement by early 1921. A three-person committee on “Agricultural History Museums” began in March 1921. It included the first editor of Agricultural History, a long-time USDA employee, and a curator in the Smithsonian’s Department of Arts and Industries. AHS board member, Herbert A. Kellar, curator at the McCormick Historical Association, supported the cause. Those who funneled collections Ford’s way benefited from such pro-museum momentum, thought Ford engaged more with preservationists, especially those involved with the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities.

Individuals and their interests and connections helped build the collections that tells the story of American agricultural and technological history today. These collections tend to be heavy in nineteenth-century hand tools, plows, fanning mills, and harvesting technology, the things rapidly falling out of use during the 1920s when Ford preserved his own boyhood home and began collecting for his “Edison Institute.” They often are mis-interpreted as testaments to technological determinism, but these artifacts remain primary sources to document local invention or entrepreneurship, and they have added relevance today in the context of organic and alternative agriculture practices and persistent rural reverence.