Highland Park: The Plant That Mass Produced the Model T

This article looks at the plant as a building and an operation: who designed it, how it was laid out, what it produced and what happened to it afterward. The line's stage-by-stage build times have their own treatment in our piece on how the Model T was built, so the figures here stay at the level of the factory.

Why Ford needed a new plant

The Model T was designed and first built at Piquette Avenue in Detroit, a three-story building Ford had moved into in 1904. It was a good factory for the cars Ford had been making. It was not a factory for the car the Model T turned into. Demand outran it almost from the start, and nearly 12,000 Model Ts were built at Piquette before Ford left.

Planning for the replacement began early. The Highland Park plant was designed in 1908, the year the Model T was introduced, which tells you Ford expected volume before it had proof of it. Most production had moved to Highland Park by January 1910, and Ford fully vacated Piquette in October 1910.

The new site was in Highland Park, Michigan. Ford's own history says Henry Ford bought a 130-acre tract there in September 1907 and that the plant itself covered about 60 acres, with construction starting in 1908. Other sources quote 102 acres or more for the later site, so the figure depends on which footprint and which year you mean.

Albert Kahn and the "Crystal Palace"

The architect was Albert Kahn, who had already designed the reinforced-concrete Building No. 10 at Detroit's Packard plant in 1905. Highland Park was his first factory for Ford. The main factory building was nicknamed the "Crystal Palace." It stood six stories, measured 865 feet by 75 feet, and carried more than 50,000 square feet of glass.

That glass was not decoration. Daylight was a production tool in a factory of that era. A long, narrow building with walls of windows put light on every bench, and open floors could be rearranged as methods changed. They changed constantly. Highland Park was built to be reorganized, and the Model T's production story is mostly a story of reorganization.

The plant was also heavily equipped. By 1914 Highland Park held about 15,000 machine tools. Ford kept a parts inventory sized for roughly 3,000 to 5,000 cars, which worked out to six to ten days of production. That buffer let the plant keep running even when a single department fell behind.

What the Highland Park Ford plant produced

The plant's defining year was 1913. Around April 1, 1913, the first moving line went into service, assembling flywheel magnetos. The idea spread through the building: to transmissions in June, to engines in November, and to the chassis, first as a trial in August 1913. The date most often given for the chassis line is October 7, 1913, but the rollout was staged, and three parallel chassis lines were running by early 1914. A caption on a 1913 photograph records 1,000 cars built in one day.

The production figures show what that meant. Ford's US Model T output, as compiled by the company's production department in 1927, is below for selected years. These are company totals (fiscal years for the early period), not counts of cars that left this one building, so treat them as the output of the system Highland Park ran.

Fiscal-year boundaries shifted in the early years, so a single annual figure can differ between sources. Nevins and Hill's well-known table, for example, labels the same fiscal years by the year they began and leaves out trucks, so its figures sit one row earlier and run lower. When you quote one, quote its source with it.

For a contemporary view of the factory, the best single record is "Ford Methods and the Ford Shops," published in 1915 by Horace Lucien Arnold for the Engineering Magazine and completed by Fay Leone Faurote. It describes Highland Park while the new methods were still fresh, and it is the kind of document I trust over most later retellings.

The people inside the plant

A factory that size needed a workforce to match, and Highland Park drew it from everywhere. Much of it was made up of immigrants, many of whom spoke no English and shared no common language with the men beside them. A figure of 53 nationalities in 1915 is often repeated, but I could not trace it to a primary record. The plant was multilingual enough that Ford set up the Ford English School, starting in 1914 by one museum account (1913 by another), which grew to more than 2,200 students and about 150 instructors by 1916.

The line made the work faster and also harder to bear, and turnover was severe. The Henry Ford's figure for 1913 is 370 percent. On January 5, 1914, Henry Ford and vice president James Couzens announced the Five Dollar Day, and thousands of job seekers arrived at the gates in the January cold. Those events belong to Highland Park, though the wage policy has a longer story of its own.

"People talk about the assembly line as if it arrived finished. The record at Highland Park shows a factory trying things department by department for more than a year, keeping what worked and dropping what did not."

Tom Ramirez

After the Model T: tractors, tanks and a plaza

The end came quickly. Henry and Edsel Ford drove the 15 millionth Model T off the Highland Park line on May 26, 1927. Ford then shut down car production for roughly six months, and when the Model A arrived, its assembly went to the River Rouge complex instead. Highland Park was not abandoned. Fordson tractors and trim work stayed, and the plant was Ford's principal US tractor plant from the 1940s into the 1960s.

During the Second World War it built 1,690 M4A3 Sherman tanks between June 1942 and September 1943, along with 1,038 M10A1 tank destroyers. Recognition followed later: Michigan State Historic Site on April 17, 1956, the National Register of Historic Places on February 6, 1973, and National Historic Landmark status on June 2, 1978.

Ford sold the building in 1981, and parts of the complex were demolished in the 1980s. The surviving buildings, known as W, X, Y and Z, cover about 1.3 million square feet. A retail center called Model T Plaza now occupies part of the site, with a Forman Mills store there since 2006.

Highland Park was not the only place experimenting with flow production in these years, and it is worth reading about the early assembly lines of other makers to see what Ford borrowed and what it invented. But no other plant of the period turned the method into output on this scale. For where the plant fits in the full story, from the T's launch to the Model A's last year, see our overview of the Model T and Model A era.

Sources and notes

• Ford Motor Company: Highland Park, birthplace of the moving assembly line
• The Henry Ford: Ford Methods and the Ford Shops
• The Henry Ford: the Sociological Department and the Ford English School
• The American Automobile Industry in World War Two: Ford Highland Park
• Wikipedia: Highland Park Ford Plant
• Wikipedia: Ford Model T (production table, Ford Production Department, 1927)