Every winter, Firestone farmers work hard preserving meats from our December butchering. Hams, bacon and fatback are all cured using a process that would have been very familiar to the Firestones in 1885.

Every day, Firestone farmers rub these cuts of meat with a mixture of salt, sugar and various spices. The salt dehydrates the meat, while sugar prevents it from getting too tough and the spices help to give the meat a nice flavor. It takes several weeks for larger cuts of meat like hams to finish curing. Once a week, old cure is removed from the meat and it is replaced with fresh cure.

Once the meat is cured, it is wrapped in cheesecloth sacks and hung in the cold room located in Firestone Farm’s cellar.

Near the meat are several other foods that were preserved last year, including dried chili peppers, pickles and crocks of sauerkraut as well as jars of tomatoes, pickled green beans, applesauce and more.

When you visit from April through November, make sure to check out the Firestone home's cellar and cold room - you'll be sure to notice our cured meat hanging from the ceiling in our cold room...and as the year progresses and the time for butchering once again approaches, there will be very little cured meat left hanging in cheesecloth.

#Behind The Scenes @ The Henry Ford, home life, food, farms and farming, Greenfield Village buildings, Greenfield Village, winter

“You must be this small to enter.” How many times do you hear that in the workplace?

This week, our historic operating machinery specialist, Tim Brewer, and I have been squeezing between tie-down cables and sliding around underneath R. Buckminster Fuller's "house of the future," the Dymaxion House. We were part of the original team that restored this unique prototype and built it inside Henry Ford Museum.

Now, for the first time since it opened in October 2001, we have closed the house to the public; this shutdown will be for as brief a time as possible - we promise! - but it is essential to ensure the long-term preservation of the structure. (In the meantime, you can still view the exhibit and the exterior of the house from the platform.)

So what exactly is happening to the Dymaxion House during this time?

This extraordinary structure really does hang from the mast, with a cabled hoop (“cage”) system that the exterior wall “skin” floats on. We are using laser-levels to assess the relative movement of components in the cage system.

In addition, the flooring system (or deck) is made of hollow aluminum “beams,” with plywood attached with clip strips of bent aluminum. Right now we are determining the extent of wear on the deck  after 10 years of relatively trouble-free service.

As expected, we are finding more deterioration in the flooring path where visitors walk through the artifact, and we’ll be working hard over the next little while to repair any damages so our favorite house can delight the public for years to come. More details to come in a future post!

Senior Conservator Clara Deck has been a conservator at The Henry Ford for 20 years. Preserving the material integrity of the objects is her job - but making them look great is icing on the cake.

Additional Readings:

• Dymaxion House
  
• Gauging the Condition of the Dymaxion House
  
• Dymaxion House
  
• Drawing, "The Dymaxion House at Henry Ford Museum," 2002

#Behind The Scenes @ The Henry Ford, Henry Ford Museum, conservation, collections care, by Clara Deck, Dymaxion House, Buckminster Fuller

The coming of a New Year is a great time to set resolutions, and for 2012, The Henry Ford has picked at least one doozy that we are very excited to share!

Over the course of the year, we will be digitizing our most “significant” icons in each of the core categories in our collections — and making those available on our collections website to anyone who is interested.

So what does that mean, and why are we so delighted about it?

Digitization is the process of making photos and information about the collections of The Henry Ford available online. In a way, this is a process that dates back to the founding of the institution, as artifacts have been catalogued and photographed over the years for internal purposes.

However, the information and images we’ve gathered and the ways in which we’ve stored those for our own usage don’t necessarily equate to the robust web presentation that we want to share with the world— so we have been spending a lot of time updating and standardizing catalog records, taking great new photographs of the collection, and writing brief narratives on the purpose and meaning of each object.

This is all part of a big project we’ve been calling CAN-DO: Collections Access Network for Digital Objects.

We really got going in earnest with this effort in 2011, with the bulk of the objects digitized either in or related to the new Driving America exhibit, which opens at the end of January. The Henry Ford obviously has very strong transportation collections, and this means that right now our digitized collections contain everything from the very rare and beautiful Bugatti...

 

...to an iconic Charles Sheeler photograph of the Ford Rouge plant in the late 1920s...

…and everything in between.

As 2011 began winding down, we started to think about what we would digitize in 2012. The Henry Ford has an embarrassment of riches in its collections, including hundreds of thousands of 3D objects and about 25 million 2D artifacts housed in the Benson Ford Research Center. Digitizing it all will be a multi-year, if not multi-decade, effort. What, we asked ourselves, should be our focus in 2012?

The answer was obvious: We need to make sure the public has digital access to the most “significant” artifacts at The Henry Ford. I put the term “significant” in quotation marks purposely, as significance has multiple meanings. Few could argue that an artifact like the city bus on which Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat is not a significant historical object. It is also institutionally unique. Many museums have civil rights artifacts, but there is only one Rosa Parks bus, and the only place to find it is at The Henry Ford.

The other dimension of “significance” is personal resonance. Certainly the Rosa Parks bus has personal significance for many people. But there’s also a pretty hefty degree to which personal significance diverges. For example, I wouldn’t necessarily expect this Buck Rogers poster to have personal significance for a large percentage of the public.

For me, though, this happens to be one of my very favorite collections objects that we’ve digitized thus far. It features a space pterodactyl, a disintegrator ray, rocketships, and many spacemen in dapper outfits, all illustrated with bright colors and fantastic graphic detail. These all happen to be things that I enjoy (space pterodactyls being a new but noteworthy addition to the list), so to me, this is particularly interesting.

We’ve been having a lot of interesting conversations about all the aspects of “significance” and how they relate to the collections of The Henry Ford, and have started throwing out ideas and making lists. Over the course of 2012, you will see these objects begin to show up on our collections website, but you’ll also hear about them in other ways — via blog posts from staff members, in the curators’ Pics of the Month and any other ways we can think of to share the stories that these objects tell.

We could not be more excited to start this project, and hope you are excited about it as well. Check our collections website frequently to visit your old favorites from the collections and discover new ones!

Ellice Engdahl is Digital Collections & Content Manager at The Henry Ford, which she thinks is quite possibly the coolest job ever — even if it’s a hazard of the job that her favorite collections object changes about 10 times a day.

#Behind The Scenes @ The Henry Ford, by Ellice Engdahl, digitization, digital collections

In the 1800s, the local post office was the epicenter for community events, functioning as both the town hall and gossip center.

Guests who have visited Greenfield Village recently may have noticed that our own historical "gossip center" - the Phoenixville Post Office, where you can purchase today's stamps and reproduction post cards - has been undergoing some necessary renovations, but luckily it's only for a short while! Let's take a closer look at what has been completed in the past month as we prepare for its re-opening in the next few weeks.

When the Phoenixville Post Office was moved to Greenfield Village from Connecticut in 1928, it was placed on a foundation that was smaller than the building. This size difference caused the entire building to shift, bow out and lean forward with time. This movement also caused the front door to lean and become crooked.

To fix the problem, our team of builders and engineers lifted the whole building (about an entire inch!) and straightened the door, as well as extended the porch in front of the post office to prevent rotting of the natural wood. A very daunting project for only a month of work!

Even though the Phoenixville Post Office will re-open to the public very soon, there still are a few things that need to be finished up for the renovation to be totally complete! Builders will replace the siding and roof as well as re-paint the exterior of the post office, although it will stay its original color.

Connecticut, Greenfield Village buildings, Greenfield Village, collections care, #Behind The Scenes @ The Henry Ford