Henry Ford had many interests —farming, social issues, food fads, politics, and pacifism among them. During a legal proceeding he once said that history was "bunk," but around 1919 he began to re-create history on his property near Dearborn in the neighborhood of his River Rouge plant. Greenfield Village became over the next twenty years a potpourri of American history: a somewhat unstructured living museum filled with tradesmen's and workers' shops and historic buildings of Various kinds (including Thomas Edison's laboratory moved from New Jersey and rebuilt on the Greenfield Village site). Ford and members of his family spent some $37 million on the project, far more than they put into their other philanthropic endeavors, such as the Ford Hospital and the Berry Schools.

Source: William S. Adams, Henry Ford and Greenfield Village (New York: Stokes, 1938).

The "Big Three."

Yet the smaller companies were of...