Henry's Lieutenants

Edward James Cutler

Edward James Cutler 1882-1961 "E. J. Cutler looked after the tearing down and moving of the buildings to the village. He saw that photographs were taken, exact measurement made, and generally looked after the reerection." —Ernest G. Heboid* Henry Ford was a stickler for detail. He could spot a huge wall out of alignment by an inch or detect an unmatched shingle or an imperfectly puttied window at some distance. To satisfy Ford's exacting requirements in restoration architecture was no simple task for Edward J. Cutler. Edward James Cutler was born in London, Ontario, on August 12, 1882, and attended public schools in London. About 1900, he left London to study art at the Cincinnati Art Academy, at that time an outstanding art school. He attended for two years before being offered a position as artist with the Hobbs Leaded Glass Company in London. His work was designing and painting figure windows. On August 14, 1907, he married Winifred Hyde of Cincinnati. While living in London, their first two children, Edward Malcolm and James Rusling Cutler, were born. Cutler stayed with Hobbs about five years, until 1908, when he started a similar business of his own, designing and painting leaded glass church windows. He gave up this business in 1912 to go to Vancouver , British Columbia, to work for Begardus-Wiggins and Company. He worked there in the same line—leaded glass—until 1914, when World War I broke out and the glass business subsided. As Cutler phrased it, "There wasn't even a good wind to blow the church windows out. There weren't any repairs to be made." In Vancouver, the Cutlers added a daughter, Sarah Lillian, to their family. At Vancouver, Cutler suffered a very serious head injury when he fell three stories while checking a leaded glass window. The family moved back to Cincinnati to allow Cutler to recover. They occupied a cottage at Milford, Ohio, on a farm belonging to Winifred Cutler's parents. In December 1915, Cut- *From the oral reminiscences of Ernest G. Liebold, general secretary to Henry Ford. 81 Henry's Lieutenants ler visited his brother, who lived in Detroit and who had one of those "high-paying" jobs at the Ford Motor Company Highland Park plant. Using his brother's connections, Cutler was given an interview. When he stated that he had been in the glass business, he was immediately put to work in the windshield department. Ford needed a man to trim the edges of windshield glass to make the glass fit the brass windshield frames. No one else there could handle the job, and Cutler handily demonstrated that he could. Cutler's glass-cutting capabilities led to his being put in charge of window maintenance for the entire building. That meant overseeing a crew of men maintaining thousands of window panes, replacing hundreds in the fall of the year before cold weather. This was not at all the type of work Cutler wanted. However, he soon found an open position in the drafting department. But the glass department would not let him go until Cutler threatened to quit altogether. He was then transferred to drafting, and he worked on ambulance designs during the balance ofWorldWarl. While he worked at the Ford Highland Park plant, Cutler and his wife, Winifred, and their young children Malcolm, Rusling, and Sarah lived at 938 Lantz Avenue, Detroit, one and a half miles north of the Ford factory. At this address, children Alfred Wylly and Winifred Cutler were born. In 1922, Cutler's small drafting group was moved to Dearborn, where, in the old Tractor Building, he worked on Model T designs. Henry Ford spent considerable time in the Tractor Building, where he conducted private projects and collected antiques. Tractor operations had been moved to the Rouge in 1920. The organization at Dearborn was not rigid, and Cutler was recommended by his drafting boss to design a windmill for Henry Ford. The windmill was to be built on the Ford homestead property a few miles away. Cutler went with Ford on drives about the countryside, viewing windmills of the type similar to Ford's recollection of the one at his home during his youth. Cutler had the rare ability to sketch quickly in detail any proposed design. In this manner—on a piece of paper, on a board, or in the sand—Ford was able to grasp Cutler's ideas. Cutler's artistic talent is credited to a large extent for his...