Looking at the Highlights of the Rouge

Last week, in this five part series, we took a look at how the new Rouge tour would run. Today, the facilitys highlights will be featured, along with some specific innovations regarding its application for building Fords all-new F-150 pickup.

The original Rouge River facility was, in large part, designed by architect Albert Kahn, the son of four German immigrants whose family arrived in Detroit when he was 11 years old in 1880. One of Kahns first jobs for Henry Ford was designing the Highland Park plant, which opened in 1910. Highland Park is where the continuous moving assembly line was used in 1914 to make Model Ts, allowing Ford to actually make cars for the masses and reduce production costs while doubling the average workers daily wage to 5 dollars a day for eight hours. The standard working day in 1914 was 9+ hours.

Henry Ford conceived of the Rouge initially as a supplier plant to Highland Park, where he would erect a massive steel making operation, but World War I intervened and Ford Motor was tapped to build the Eagle Boat submarine chasers. Kahn designed the four-story tall "Building B" where the Eagle Boats were made and this building was later converted into Dearborn Assembly where tractors, cars and trucks eventually came from, including the legendary Mustang. Building B was also used to house things from the Henry Ford Trade School to the Rouge complexs hospital.

Then Ford went into its experiment with vertical integration, where the Rouge became a vast, interconnected series of factories.

The "Rouge Plant" employed more than 100,000 people in 1929 when the Model A was being made. (Photo: Ford Motor Company)

The Rouge was an inspiration to Adolph Hitler to create Volkswagen (the "peoples car") before the outbreak of World War II, and in the early 1950s to Toyotas Eiji Toyoda, nephew of the Japanese automakers founder, and Taichi Ohno, Toyotas vice president and manufacturing genius, to build up to Toyotas now acknowledged quality and manufacturing standards.

After World War II, however, Fords management began to realize that the one-and-a-half mile long, three-quarter-mile wide complex was too big for its own good and began diversifying operations away from Dearborn. And, over time, the Rouge suffered, losing factories, jobs and prestige. Its factories began operating as separate entities, with very little effort to coordinate the activities from one plant to the next.

The new Dearborn Truck Plant represents a tangible effort by Ford to not only recreate the Rouge, but to recreate itself to meet the challenges of the

The Dearborn Assembly Plant which was built in 1917 is still producing the Mustang. (Photo: Ford Motor Company)

The Dearborn Assembly Plant, which is still producing the Mustang until the truck plant comes on line, is an aging four-story assembly plant. It was originally built back in 1917 to construct the Eagle Boats and U-Boat submarine chasers for World War II and then modified to be a Model T parts supplier plant to the Highland Park factory and, for a time, to build the Fordson tractor.

In 1929, the assembly plant underwent yet another in a series of changes as it built the Model A. It also used to house the old Henry Ford Trade School, the Rouge hospital, engineering labs, and other Ford office facilities. The Dearborn Independent, the Ford-owned paper that printed a series of anti-Semitic articles in the 1920s along with other stories, was even housed in the factory for a time.

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