50 Years Ago: Rose Cottage, Greenfield Village

Postmarked 18 August 1960
Dearborn, MI

According to the Greenfield Village website:

Entering Greenfield Village is like stepping into an 80-acre time machine. It takes you back to the sights, sounds and sensations of America’s past. There are 83 authentic, historic structures, from Noah Webster’s home, where he wrote the first American dictionary, to Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park laboratory, to the courthouse where Abraham Lincoln practiced law. The buildings and the things to see are only the beginning. There’s the fun stuff, too. In Greenfield Village, you can ride in a genuine Model T or “pull” glass with world-class artisans; you can watch 1867 baseball or ride a train with a 19th-century steam engine. It’s a place where you can choose your lunch from an 1850s menu or spend a quiet moment pondering the home and workshop where the Wright brothers invented the airplane. Greenfield Village is a celebration of people — people whose unbridled optimism came to define modern-day America.

I wondered why an English cottage would be a part of an attraction highlighting America's past until I read that Henry Ford's wife loved gardens, especially cottage gardens. A blogger familiar with the park writes about the cottage's history here. This post explains that the 1620 structure was restored in England, disassembled, shipped, and then reassembled in Dearborn.