Carol Gelderman: The Henry Ford Motor Camping Trips

THE HENRY FORD MOTOR CAMPING TRIPS

by Carol Gelderman

Henry Ford once complained it was difficult for a famous man to make friends. It was the reason, he said, that he cherished the company of his equally celebrated contemporaries, John Burroughs, Thomas Edison, and Harvey Firestone, and why he often reminisced about the annual camping trips the foursome made from 1918 until 1924. Although their expeditions were meant to provide the celebrities with backwoods pleasure, they were anything but rustic.

Clad in linen dusters and soft caps, Ford, Firestone, Edison, and Burroughs drove 70 miles a day along back roads in various parts of the northeast and midwest in a caravan of trucks and cars, “roughing it” with chauffeurs and cooks, table linen, and silver. Each camper slept in his own ten-by-ten tent complete with floor, electricity, screens. folding cot, mattress, blankets, sheets, pillows, and a name plate on the outside flap. There was a special kitchen tent with a refrigerator and a dining tent with a table that seated 20. Maybe because their equipment was so elaborate, no one wore casual clothes: each man appeared at breakfast every morning in shirt and tie.

The group moved quarters each day. “When we have settled on a camping site,” Burroughs wrote in his journal, “Mr. Edison settles down in his car and reads or meditates, Mr. Ford seizes an axe and swings it vigorously till there is enough wood for the campfire. Mr. Ford is more adaptive, more indifferent to places than

Camping trip 1918. Back seat (l-r) H.S. Firestone, Henry Ford. Front seat: Thomas Edison, H.S. Firestone, Jr.

is Mr. Edison.” And, for that matter, than all the others. He would bathe in a creek, whereas Firestone wanted to stop in a hotel for his bath. He was always up by fivethirty, no matter how late the men retired the night before.

Ford had been an admirer of Burroughs long before they met. He had been dismayed when the naturalist's writings began to indicate a “grudge against modern progress,” so he sent a Ford car as a gift, with the request that he try it out and see if it wouldn't help him “to know nature better.”

“One day I got a letter from the man at the head of Henry Ford's advertising department,” Burroughs related, “saying that Mr. Ford had read my books and they had given him a great deal of pleasure, and he wanted to make me a present of a Ford car. I didn't know what in the dickens to make of such an offer, and I talked it over with my friends. They advised me to take the car, and I wrote back, ‘If it would please Mr. Ford to present me with one of his cars, it would please me to accept the car.’” Six months later, in June of 1913, Burroughs visited the manufacturer in Detroit.

Ford's friendship with Firestone began as a business relationship, Firestone being a large supplier of Model T tires, but blossomed into a life-long admiration based on his respect for the tire-maker’s enlightened labor policies. Ford’s association with Edison, however, was entirely different. Ever since their first meeting in 1896, Ford had idolized the inventor. In the summer of that year, Alex Dow, Ford’s boss at the Detroit Edison Illumination Company, took his chief engineer to the annual convention of the Association of Edison Illuminating Companies at Manhattan Beach in Brooklyn. The highlight of the convention for Ford was a discussion the delegates had about what promised to be their biggest source of future revenue: storage batteries for electric automobiles. Nearly everyone present assumed that the horseless carriage of the future would be an electric vehicle, but Alex Dow, pointing to Ford, announced, “This young fellow here has made a gas car.” Ford described his engine, speaking loudly because Edison was hard of hearing. “Edison asked me no end of details,” Ford told his wife when he returned to Detroit, “and I sketched everything for him, for I have always found I could convey an idea quicker by sketching than by just describing it. When I finished, he brought his fist down on the table with a bang and said, ‘Young man, that's the thing; you have it! Keep at it! Electric cars must keep near to power stations. The storage battery is too heavy. Steam cars won’t do either for they have to carry a boiler and fire. Your car is self-contained – it carries its own power plant – no fire, no boiler, no smoke, no steam. You have the thing. Keep at

it!’ That bang on the table was worth worlds to me. No man up to that time had given me any encouragement.”

Edison promptly forgot the young man from Detroit, whose name he never caught anyway, but for the next eleven years Ford secretly worshipped Edison. In 1907, he ventured to write, “My dear Mr. Edison: I am fitting up a den for my private use at the factory and I thought I would like to have photographs of about three of the greatest inventors of this age to feast my eyes on in idle moments. Needless to say, Mr. Edison is the first of the three and I would esteem it a great personal favor if you would send me a photograph of yourself.”

“No ans.,” Edison scrawled across Ford's letter. Ford was only one of more than 150 automobile manufacturers; his name meant nothing to Edison. By the time of their second meeting in 1912, however, Ford, as producer of better than a quarter of all motorcars, was fairly well known. He went to see his idol at his laboratory in New Jersey to discuss using Edison batteries in the Model T. Other manufacturers had made inquiries at Edison's New Jersey office, but only Ford promised four million dollars in yearly orders. Edison, always slightly hard up for cash, joined forces with Ford. Six months after their business arrangement, he and his wife drove through New York state and Canada to Dearborn to stay with the Fords.

Edison worked on developing a suitable battery for the Model T two-and-ahalf years. Ford financed the unsuccessful experimentation to the tune of 1.5 million dollars. Already frustrated by his inability to produce a workable battery, Edison suffered further reverses when his factory complex at West Orange caught fire. Insurance covered only $200,000 of his losses; Ford made up the remaining $100,00.

Not surprisingly, relations between the Fords and Edisons became increasingly friendly. Henry started sending the Edisons a Model T each Christmas, and, in 1914 and 1915, he and Clara visited them at their winter home in Fort Myers, Florida. At the end of their 1915 visit, the four friends went to San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific Exposition, named for the just-completed Panama Canal, to see the replica of the Ford assembly line that was the highlight of the fair. It was here that the idea of the camping trips originated.

Edison, Burroughs, and Firestone made the first trip in the summer of 1916, Ford being unable to attend. Edison took care of the arrangements, providing for a touring car to carry the party and a Model T truck to follow it, bearing tents and camping equipment, servants, and drivers. During the short trip of ten days, the men covered hundreds of miles of unpaved country roads in the Adirondacks and upper Vermont. The next tour, through the Smoky Mr. Harvey S. Firestone and Mr. Thomas A. Edison at the Edison Laboratory, East Mountains, took Orange, N.J., before first camping trip, August 28, 1916. place in the summer of 1918 and included Ford. The 1919 trip meandered through upstate New York, Vermont, and New Hampshire. The wives of the original foursome came along on the 1920 trek through the Catskills and again in 1921 through Maryland and Pennsylvania, accompanied by the President of the United States, Warren Harding. Owing to Burroughs’ death in 1921, there was no trip in 1922, but in 1923 the party visited Calvin Coolidge in Massachusetts and, in 1924, the last year of the organized tours, the group journeyed in late spring across the upper peninsula of Michigan to visit Ford properties at Iron Mountain, Sidnaw, and L’Anse and, in late fall, the party assembled for the last time at the Wayside Inn, which Ford had just purchased, in Massachusetts. “The trips were good fun,” Ford wrote in My Life and Work, “except that they began to attract too much attention.” In reality, Ford was intoxicated by the limelight – any limelight. Newsmen and photographers followed the campers everywhere they went, reporting their every move and utterance. Movie theaters throughout the country showed the men – Ford and Firestone in their fifties, Edison in his seventies, and Burroughs in his eighties – in running, jumping, chopping, and climbing contests, competitions staged, most likely, for their publicity value. Newspaper headlines proclaimed, “Millions of Dollars Worth of Brains Off On a Vacation,” “Genius to Sleep Under the Stars,” “Kings of Industry and Inventor Paid City Visit,” and “Henry Ford Demonstrates He's Not Afraid of Work: Repairs His Damaged Car.”