ALBERTA

Region: Keweenaw Peninsula

Henry Ford wasn't content to establish this sawmill for boards to side his "Woody" station wagons. He wanted to create an idyllic model sawmill village where millworkers would grow a good deal of their own food.

This picture-perfect sawmill and village were built in 1935 as part of Henry Ford's idealistic (and expensive) village industries concept. Ford wanted to revitalize the rural life his own automobiles and huge assembly plants had done so much to disrupt. Of some two dozen of Ford's village industries, this model village is the only one in which the entire village was built from scratch. Ford chose the location not just for its proximity to lots of hardwoods and the big Ford planing mill and dry kilns at L'Anse, but for its visibility, right on U.S. 41, the main route from Marquette or Iron Mountain to L'Anse and Houghton.

One of Henry Ford's pet projects, this 1930s sawmill was a synergy of both economic and social goals. The timber sawn for his autos was logged from 400,000 acres of Ford-owned Upper Peninsula forests. His millhands here lived in Ford-designed houses and had to live by his many dictates. Other Ford "village industries" dotted the countryside on rivers in southeast Michigan.

To earn a living, Ford employees in Alberta were to farm as well as work in the village sawmill. The elderly Ford had the resources to turn his dreams into first-rate reality. When he built Alberta in the wilderness, he installed a new water and sewage system, sidewalks, lighted boulevards, a church, a school, and a fire department. Explains the 1941 WPA guide to Michigan, "The 12 houses are set in a horseshoe formation opening on the main road. Surrounded by a virgin hardwood forest [owned by Ford], unbroken for miles by any sign of settlement, the new homes, neat streets, and well-kept lawns have on first sight an appearance of unreality."

Highway 41 North

Alberta back when the Ford sawmill was still operating and trees hadn't yet obscured the workers' homes.

Return to Keweenaw Peninsula