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46 Fair Lane Mansion Henry, Clara, and Edsel Ford were living very comfortably on Edison Avenue in Detroit when the Selden patent suit was settled in favor of Ford at New York in January 1911. This was a great relief to Ford and to the Ford Motor Company, who had been trying to free themselves from Selden’s automotive patent since 1903. In October 1911, Clara’s mother, Martha, a staunch supporter of Henry and frequent guest of the Fords, died at the Bryant homestead. Clara loved her mother, who often spoke of the town of Warwick, England, where she had been born and lived until she was eight years old before coming to America with her father, William Bench. Following Edsel’s completion of school in the summer of 1912, the Fords took their first trip abroad. On this combined business and pleasure trip, both Henry and Clara planned to seek out their family roots. In England, they visited Warwick and found the home where Clara’s mother had lived as a child. Later, in Ireland, they concentrated on County Cork. In Cork City, Henry found the street where his foster grandfather had lived as a boy and, in the Irish countryside, the small farm with dry-stone cottage near the little town of Ballinascarthy where his father had lived as a boy. The street in Cork City, the boyhood home of Henry’s grandfather Patrick Ahern, had in early days been the lane people took to get to the city’s fairgrounds and was named Fair Lane. Henry’s grandfather had often told of the early pleasures of Fair Lane. Henry knew no other grandfather. Patrick lived with Henry’s family and was Henry’s pal during the first eighteen years of Henry’s life. The name of Fair Lane meant much to Henry. That was where the birds sang sweetest, and Henry had been taught those bird calls by his grandfather. Ford might not have agreed to the abrupt raise of factory pay to five dollars a day at Ford Motor Company in January 1914 if he had known the effect it would have on his family life. His home on Edison Avenue close to the factory was immediately besieged with workers clamoring for jobs. The Fords no longer had the privacy they desired. They already had decided against moving out of Detroit to Grosse Pointe, where other wealthy business families resided, in favor of Dearborn, where 342 their old-time friends were living. They had purchased hundreds of acres in the Dearborn area and picked a location they owned on the Rouge River known as the Black Farm, where they would build a home much more opulent than their Edison Avenue residence in Detroit. Henry Ford may have approached Frank Lloyd Wright in 1909 concerning a new home, thinking his house on Edison Avenue was much too modest. Only three blocks away, his business partner, Childe Harold Wills, was planning to build an elaborate home designed by Wright’s protégé, Marion Mahony. But because Wright temporarily left the country at that time, his architectural business was turned over to Van Holst and Fyfe of Chicago. Without written contracts, Ford arranged in 1912 to employ Van Holst and Fyfe as architects and Frank Goddard of Detroit as contractor to build a residence in Dearborn at a cost not to exceed $250,000. Preliminary work began in July 1913, but plans were so elaborate and expenses so much more than expected that Ford terminated the work of both Van Holst and Fyfe and Frank Goddard in February 1914. It was Clara Ford who found a Pittsburgh construction manager, W. H. Van Tine, to act as both architect and contractor for a home to be known as Fair Lane. Henry seems not to have found fault with Van Tine. Was it because Van Tine was Clara’s choice? Expenses incurred by Van Tine would accumulate to more than $1 million with barely a whimper from Henry. Ford’s chief interest was in the powerhouse he would build. On the Black Farm purchased in July 1909, he had built a dam on the Rouge River and a small power plant. Ford now wanted a much larger one. In 1913, his new power plant, designed by Mark A. Replogie, was equipped with two Leffel water-driven turbines and two electric generators to supply 110 kilowatts of direct power. For its day, it was exceedingly efficient. Housed in a four-story...

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