Miller School

In the early United States, schools were organized if the local community desired them, and generally parents had to pay for their children to attend. This is a hand-written bill from a teacher in Bethany, Connecticut. Parents were billed for their children's education as well as the teacher's board (food and shelter).

Henry Ford began restoration of his Dearborn, Michigan, birthplace in 1919. He repaired or replaced the farm buildings and filled the small, white clapboard house with original or similar furnishings he remembered from his boyhood. He dedicated the restoration to the memory of his beloved mother, Mary Litogot Ford, who died in 1876. In 1944, the house and outbuildings were moved to Greenfield Village.

Part of Henry Ford's love of the past stemmed from his fondness for the McGuffey Readers he had read as a boy. But collecting hundreds of readers was not enough to satisfy his yearning to re-claim this part of his past. In 1932, he purchased the log birthplace of William Holmes McGuffey and moved it to Greenfield Village.

As America was taking its first steps towards industrialization, the Hanks family of Mansfield, Connecticut, made early attempts to mechanize the production of silk thread. Rodney Hanks and his nephew Horatio Hanks built this mill in 1810. It was the first silk mill in America, producing some of the first silk with machines that were powered by a waterwheel.