Built in 1888-89, Henry Ford’s Square House is one of the automaker’s earliest personal artifacts—and it’s still around today. MCG pays a visit. 

When Henry and Clara Bryant Ford married in April of 1888, Henry’s father William, a prosperous farmer in Greenfield Township, gave the bridegroom a 40-acre parcel he’d purchased. Known as the Moir place (pronounced more), the farm included a rustic house for the couple to live in and a stand of trees that Henry could cut for timber and earn some money.

Ford Senior was hoping the property would help Henry, then 25, put down roots as a farmer and forget his mechanized ambitions in Detroit. That was not to be, obviously, but for a brief time, Henry knuckled down, set up a steam engine and sawmill on the Moir place, and cut timber for money. The newlyweds moved into the old Moir homestead while Clara drew the plans for a house of their own. It was she who laid out the distinctive square floor plan. It was 31 feet on a side with four rooms: a kitchen, a parlor, a sitting room, and a bedroom.

William Ford’s farmhouse, where Henry was born in 1863, was near the southeast corner of the roads known today as Ford and Greenfield (here marked WF in red). The property William gave Henry (HF in red) and where he built the Square House was about one mile west, at the northeast corner of Ford and Emerson Road, now the Southfield Freeway. The William Ford house was eventually moved to Greenfield Village. 

Setting aside a portion of the timber he felled and sawed, Henry hired a finishing carpenter named Traverse to assist and they built Clara her little home. Henry and Clara lived here, in what would become known as the square house or the honeymoon house, from June of 1889 until September of 1891, when Henry landed a job in Detroit as a night engineer for the Edison Illuminating Company. The couple then took up residence on John R Street in Detroit near the Edison substation at Woodward and Willis.

As the Ford Motor Company thrived, Henry hung onto the family’s properties in Dearborn, adding to the holdings until he was the biggest landowner in Wayne County. For a time, the Fords used the Square House as a summer cottage. In the ’30s, the old Moir farm became the home for Ford’s soybean experiments, with the original Moir homestead serving as the laboratory, even though it had no electricity.

The Square house in later years, evidently the ’20s. There are now outbuildings and a gazebo, and the house now boasts an L-shaped porch and a widow’s walk. 

In 1937, Ford gave the Square House to his chief soybean researcher, Robert Smith, to use as his personal residence. When the construction of the Southfield Freeway threatened the house, the Ford Land Development Corporation arranged in 1952 to have it picked up and moved six miles west to a residential neighborhood near Ford and Middlebelt road.

Here at this second location, the Square House survives to this day, in the hands of a private owner and apparently in excellent condition. The interior has been modernized over the years, reportedly, but the exterior retains its original appearance with clapboard siding and mansard roof. The home is a Michigan State Historic Site and is listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places. You can see the Square House at 29835 Beechwood Avenue in Garden City, Michigan.