09/08/2026
Henry Ford built a whole town in the Baraga County woods, and then barely used it. 🌲
Alberta opened in 1936 as one of Ford's model villages, a tidy little settlement of matching white houses around a small, spotless sawmill on US-41. Ford had this idea that industry and small-town life could fit together, that a mill did not have to mean a grim company town. So he built the neat version, houses for the workers, a school, a pond, all of it planned. 🏡
The mill was never a big money-maker. It was more of a showpiece, a demonstration of how you could cut timber carefully and give people a decent place to live doing it. The sawmill ran into the 1950s. ⚙️
Ford gave the whole thing to Michigan Tech, and today Alberta is the university's forestry center, still standing, still white, still tucked in the pines exactly where he put it. One of the strangest and gentlest things a car man ever built up north.
