Industry History | Ford — The Mill Building at 461 Piquette Avenue
· 1904-10
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Industry History | Ford — The Mill Building at 461 Piquette Avenue
kevin
People treat the first Ford factory as Highland Park, or as the later River Rouge yards.
The first plant the company built for itself stands here, at 461 Piquette Avenue on the Milwaukee Junction rail line in Detroit.
Ford Motor Company was organized on 16 June 1903 and first assembled cars in a rented wagon shop on Mack Avenue. On 1 April 1904 the board bought 3.11 acres on Piquette for 23,500 dollars. The next day it authorized a factory whose construction cost was not to exceed 76,500 dollars, in 1904 currency.
Field, Hinchman & Smith designed a three-storey New England mill building 402 feet long and 56 feet wide, with load-bearing brick, wooden posts, and a 25,000-gallon roof tank feeding automatic sprinklers. Construction started in May. The company moved in that October.
Models B, C, F, K, N, R and S were assembled in this loft. The Experimental Room on the third floor is where the Model T was designed. The first production T cars left this floor after the 1908 introduction.
The moving assembly line that later defined Highland Park was conceived as a response to the congestion inside this building. The plant itself never received the full line.
Ford left Piquette for Highland Park in 1910. The mill survived as a supplier building and, after a long afterlife, opened as a public museum on the original lot.
The pin is the standing NHL structure at Piquette and Beaubien, visitable from the sidewalk and by ticketed tour. It is not Highland Park and it is not Rouge.
The mechanism is space before speed. A company that had outgrown a rented wagon shop put a sprinklered loft on a rail junction. Volume followed the loft. The line came later, in a different building, because this one filled up.
Photo: Ford Piquette Avenue Plant, circa 1906, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. A Model N is on the street in the foreground.
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