100 years ago in The Record
Thursday, Aug. 29, 1918
Automobile manufacturer Henry Ford is finalizing the purchase of “the whole northern section of the village of Green Island” for a new tractor parts factory that will employ between 10,000 and 15,000 people, The Record reports. Green Island Chamber of Commerce president Samuel N. Hutchinson announces that “the transaction has so far crystallized that deeds were being circulated among the owners, members of the Tibbits and Griswold families, for their signatures.” The news follows the publication yesterday in the September issue of The World’s Work magazine of a Ford article announcing his plans for developing this part of the country. The auto magnate, best known for his Model T cars, envisions a workforce of farmers who’ll use his Fordson tractors to revitalize local agriculture. “We can give employment in this plant to a large number of workers who can live on farms for a long distance around,” Ford writes, “They can work in this plant and earn $5 a day and upward, and get enough out of their winter’s labor to pay for their farms. “It is my intention to try to make this plant a demonstration centre for the rebuilding of the abandoned farms of New England and Northern New York. I motored through that country recently from Oswego east, and I was amazed at the amount of valuable land lying idle.
“It is this sort of productive industry that I am going to link up closely to the farm, to demonstrate the final stage of what I believe to be the solution of the problem of living.”
“Mr. Ford is an idealist, in many respects an extremist,” our editors observe, “but he has fully demonstrated his practicability and his ability to transform into reality the castles he builds in his mind.
“His scheme or reclamation by education and by solving the combined problem of transportation, agriculture and industry, promises great results…. Locally the business transaction will be of immense advantage.
“It will mean the erection of large plants and the employment of from ten to fifteen thousand men. This is the sort of industrial impetus Troy needs. And benefit will accrue not only to Green Island and Troy but to the vicinity inasmuch as Mr. Ford’s plan includes workers who by reason of motor transportation will be able to live on and work their farms in summer and earn good wages in the factory in winter.”
Ford’s purchase covers approximately 400 acres, including “what is commonly known as the prairie” and Mohawk Pines. The Troybased Tolhurst Machine Works will retain the plant it recently built in that part of the village.