Ford, Edison and their Summit stay
On a wall near the Historic Summit Inn registration desk hangs a framed page with the signatures of some famous guests from long ago. Two signatures belong to two titans of the early 20th century whose work transformed America and the world forever.
Henry Ford and Thomas Edison spent a night at the mountain resort in 1918. How and why are explained in the newish (2023) book “American Journey” by Wes Davis, which recounts the vehicular adventures of four unlikely friends: Ford, the automaker; Edison, the inventor; Harvey Firestone, the tire manufacturer; and elderly John Burroughs, the naturalist and writer who was an intimate of Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the 1860s and 1870s.
Today’s equivalent party? Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jane Goodall.
Imagine getting those four together around a campfire for weeks on end, sleeping in tents, trading yarns, greeting the good folks in the backcountry after hours of travel on primitive, half-paved roads.
Yea, like that’s even a possibility.
At best, it’s highly improbable, which might have been what Americans thought when they learned that Edison, Ford, Firestone, and Burroughs were not only friends but traveling companions.
As Davis explains in American Journey, the 1918 trek was not a one-off. There had been an earlier excursion and there would be later ones, though not for Burroughs, who died in his 80s in 1921.
First, a word about Ford and Edison.
Famous for the custom-black, low-cost Model T, Ford re-imagined the American workplace: to him belongs the credit, and the blame, for the factory assembly line. Assailed by critics and labor leaders, the assembly line revolutionized the manufacturing process. Indeed, it BECAME the manufacturing process.
According to historian David Kennedy, assembly line production helped to win World War II. Without Ford’s innovation, the U.S. might never have become the “arsenal of democracy.” Without Ford’s innovation, we might yet be living in Adolf Hitler’s world.
The Model T was itself revolutionary, bringing the speed and convenience of motoring to millions of average Americans. Ford was a leader in worker-management relations as well; among other things, he raised wages to afford Ford Motor Company employees a decent standard of living, while his fellow industrialists stubbornly resisted putting more money into workers’ pockets.
To his everlasting shame, Ford was virulently anti-semitic. And he opposed labor unions.
Edison, born in Ohio and raised in Michigan, settled in New Jersey. His Menlo Park and later his West Orange, N.J., and Fort Myers, Fla., laboratories became hubs of American innovation and invention beginning in 1876 and continuing until his death in 1931.
By 15, Edison embarked on a lifetime of visionary achievement, setting up a lab on the train where he was hired to sell candy. A year after establishing himself at Menlo Park in 1876, he offered improvements to the telephone and gave the world the phonograph, a tinfoil coated cylinder, diaphragm and needle contraption. Edison uttered the first words ever recorded: “Mary had a little lamb.”
The incandescent light bulb and the motion picture camera followed. Edison Film’s 12-minute long “The Great Train Robbery” directed by Connellsville’s Edward S. Porter debuted in 1903.
Here, in brief, is how Edison, Ford, Firestone, and Burroughs spent a night at the Summit Inn in the summer of 1918: Motoring from Pittsburgh to Connellsville, where Ford had repaired one of the party’s battered cars at an Apple Street garage, the “vagabond” road-warriors, taking the road to Uniontown through West Leisenring, got separated from the truck that was carrying their tents and other supplies.
As Davis explains: “Ford and Firestone managed to convince Edison that under the circumstances … it made sense to find a hotel for the night. Although he vowed not to spend any time indoors on this trip, Edison eventually agreed to a night of soft living. Firestone had learned of a seasonal hotel nearby…. The Summit Inn [was a] relatively new Mission-style building – it had been built just eleven years earlier…. The staff gave the campers a warm welcome and served them an excellent dinner soon after they arrived.”
Ford and Firestone then walked to a place on the mountainside where “a cascade of shaggy green undulations tumbling down to a broad plain” brought Uniontown into view. Firestone thought it all quite wonderful.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.