History
Willow Run Airport was named for a small stream that meandered through pastureland and woods until the late-1930s. Automobile pioneer Henry Ford bought the property that became the airport, and used it as farmland for a “social engineering” experiment that brought inner-city boys to Willow Run Farm to learn about nature, farming tasks, and the rural way of life. The residents at Willow Run Farm planted, tended, and harvested crops as well as running a maple syrup operation, and sold their products at the farm market on the property. In the process, the boys learned self-discipline and the values of hard work, and benefited from the fresh air that they had not been able to experience while growing up in congested cities.
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In the history of the human mind, these glowing and ruddy fables precede the noonday thoughts of men, as Aurora the sun’s rays. The matutine intellect of the poet, keeping in advance of the glare of philosophy, always dwells in this auroral atmosphere.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)