Motor City & Automotive History

The Model T has an address

The Ford Piquette Avenue Plant museum preserves the Detroit birthplace of the Model T. Piquette is the starting point for this route: a specific building where a vast industrial story becomes tangible.

Read the factory alongside the city around it. What kinds of skills did the work require? Where did workers live? How did a growing business change nearby land, transport, and daily life? These questions connect automobile history to architecture, family history, and labor history.

Highland Park and the moving assembly line

Ford’s Highland Park plant opened in 1910, with buildings designed by Albert Kahn. In 1913, moving assembly-line methods changed Model T production there. The Model T remained in production at Highland Park until 1927; Model A production moved to the Rouge. Read the Detroit Historical Society’s plant history.

The familiar efficiency story is only one part of the history. Follow the buildings, then ask about the pace of work, wages, migration, and the communities formed around the factory. Cars belong in this collection alongside the people who made them.

Watch this HLC film on YouTube

The Motor City reaches across Michigan

Read the story in both directions

Go backward into Detroit’s stove-making years to understand the earlier manufacturing landscape. Move outward through Great Lakes shipping to examine how industrial cities depended on water, material, and transport networks. Then cross state lines with the Indianapolis film and look beyond the racing nickname.