Seeing a Model T and Model A at The Henry Ford

The Henry Ford is a campus, not a single hall. The museum, the village and the archives each hold part of the story, and the Model T and Model A are spread across them. This is a guide to where the cars actually are, and what is worth standing in front of for a while.

The Model T in Driving America

Inside the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation, the cars live in Driving America, a permanent exhibit that opened on January 29, 2012. It covers 80,000 square feet and holds about 130 vehicles. You walk through it the way the country drove: horse-drawn and steam, then brass, then everything after.

The Model T to find is a red 1909 touring car. Senior curator Bob Casey put it on his short list of must-sees and called it the "big demarcation point" in the exhibit. Red is the first surprise for most visitors. The early cars came in colors; black came later. The second surprise is how upright and narrow it is. In photographs a Model T looks like furniture. Up close it looks like a tool.

Stand by it long enough and you notice the people who stop. Some read the label. Some just look at the wheels, thin and wooden, and do the arithmetic of a century of roads.

A Model A touring car, and the one that is missing

The Model A on display in Driving America is a 1930 Ford Model A touring car, object 76.143.1, a gift of John F. Morse. The museum's own record notes its 201 cubic inch engine, 40 horsepower at 2,200 rpm and three-speed gearbox, and lists a price of $645. Ford's factory list price for a standard 1930 phaeton was $440, so the museum's figure probably includes extras. The record also gives the arithmetic that makes the car rare: 16,470 open phaetons out of nearly 1,160,000 Model As sold in 1930.

Visitors often come looking for a different Model A, the one Henry Ford gave to Thomas Edison. The museum describes it as "the first example," rebuilt with an open touring body at Edison's request. Edison drove it until his death in 1931, and his widow, Mina Miller Edison, donated it. It is not in Dearborn. As of October 2026 it is on loan to the Model A Ford Museum on the Gilmore Car Museum campus in Hickory Corners, Michigan, about 115 miles west of Detroit. If Edison's car is the reason for your trip, plan for both stops.

"I have watched people walk past a brass radiator and stop dead at a wooden wheel. The big story is in the labels. The small one is in what makes a person slow down."

Nora Beckett

The fifteen millionth Ford in Greenfield Village

Out in Greenfield Village, the 1927 Model T touring car known as "The Fifteen Millionth Ford" (object 00.136.124) is shown in the Ford Motor Company (Mack Avenue Plant) building. The museum record lists it at 22.5 horsepower on a 100 inch wheelbase. Those are modest figures for a car that marked the end of a run of fifteen million.

Check before you go. The car traveled to Washington, D.C., for "Driving America Forward" at Union Station, which ran through July 14, 2026. A loan can take an artifact off its usual spot for months, and the village itself is seasonal.

The village is also where the Model T stops being an exhibit. Greenfield Village sells Model T rides, on individual tickets or an unlimited Ride Pass, and has run a reworked version of the ride since 2003. Most of the cars are vintage. Some are 1914 Model Ts that Ford hand-built for its 2003 centennial, and those carry electric starters, although the Model T itself got a starter only in 1919. You can also watch daily driving demonstrations on those centennial cars. These are rides, though, not lessons. Greenfield Village is not a driving school.

Planning a Henry Ford Museum Model T visit

Give the museum and the village separate days if you can. Driving America alone takes a morning for anyone who reads labels, and the village rewards an unhurried afternoon with a ride at the end of it.

Read up before you go. The Henry Ford's own curators have written about the first moving line for flywheel magnetos at Highland Park, around April 1, 1913, and that background makes the cars on the floor easier to place. A short primer on Ford assembly line history covers the same ground.

If one Model T museum is not enough, the next stop is Richmond, Indiana, where the Model T Ford Club of America keeps its own collection. Dearborn shows the Model T as a chapter in the national story, while the Richmond museum shows it the way its owners see it: up close, with the hood open.

Either way, the moment that stays with you is rarely a number. It is a red car from 1909, standing still, while people walk past it at the speed of the twenty-first century.

Sources and notes

• The Henry Ford: 1930 Ford Model A touring car (76.143.1)
• The Henry Ford: The Fifteen Millionth Ford, 1927 Model T touring car
• The Henry Ford: Thomas Edison's 1928 Model A
• The Henry Ford: Blue Bird No. 1 school bus on a 1927 Model TT chassis
• Greenfield Village: Model T and other rides
• KENW/NPR on the opening of Driving America (2012)