The Ford Motor Company's Iron Mountain plant complex, built in the early 1920s in what became Kingsford, employed 7,271 men by November 1925. (Photo courtesy of the Menominee Range Historical Museum)

IRON MOUNTAIN — For Henry Ford in the early 1900s, the Upper Peninsula wasn’t just a place to vacation, it offered opportunity and resources for his growing Ford Motor Company auto manufacturing operation.

Ford, in turn, would put the U.P. — and Iron Mountain area, in particular — on the map as the automotive industry exploded in America.

Ford’s first documented visit to Iron Mountain was May 28, 1907, according to “Iron Mountain Ford Motor Company Plant, Kingsford, Dickinson County, Michigan 1920-1951,” a 2019 PowerPoint presentation by local historian William John Cummings.

Ford had an aunt, Nancy (Ford) Flaherty, whose husband Thomas designed and constructed shaft houses for the copper and iron mines throughout the Upper Peninsula, living in Ontonagon, Houghton and Marquette before coming to Iron Mountain in 1880. Their daughter, Mary Frances “Minnie” Flaherty, married Edward George Kingsford on April 8, 1890.

Back then, according to “Ford plant’s workforce grew by thousands,” a “Menominee Range Memories” article printed in The Daily News in August 2017, “In 1900, Iron Mountain’s population stood at 9,242. Although this was 1,600 more than in 1894, when the national economic downturn coupled with the flooding of key mines led to high unemployment and removals from the area, it was only a few hundred more than in 1890.

“Though the population fluctuated over the following two decades, the 1904, 1910 and 1920 censuses all showed the population below the 1900 figure. The 1920 federal census listed Iron Mountain’s population at 8,251.”

But in the 1920s, the Iron Mountain area and much of the Upper Peninsula would be transformed in what was termed the “Ford Boom.”

Ford had contacted Edward Kingsford — his cousin-in-law, then a real estate agent who owned a Ford dealership in Iron Mountain — about acquiring timberland in Upper Peninsula, according to Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation in Dearborn, Mich.

In early 1920, news surfaced the Ford Motor Company planned to build a sawmill and factory to make wooden automobile components somewhere in the western Upper Peninsula, as written in January 2014 in “Menominee Range Memories,” a series of articles by Cummings, then Menominee Range Historical Foundation historian.

Ford had at the time purchased 430,000 acres of timberland in the area of Lake Michigamme in Iron, Baraga and Marquette counties to provide the company with its own source of wood for manufacturing Ford parts such as wood paneling.

Lumber from the northern woodlands back then was shipped to the company’s plants in Detroit, made into parts and then re-shipped to branch assembly plants. Ford’s plan was to establish a sawmill and parts factory near the sources of the raw materials and ship the parts directly to the assembly plants.

Ford, together with son Edsel and company general manager C. W. Avery, visited Iron Mountain as a prospective site for a factory on July 7, 1920. Other prospective sites mentioned at the time included Menominee, Marquette and Republic.

By July 16, Ford had decided on Iron Mountain for his sawmill and body parts factory, and the next day Ford engineers arrived in the city and began laying out the site. Work began before the end of July and connection was made to the Chicago & North Western Railway. The company eventually purchased 3,000 acres, Cummings wrote.

In mid-August 1920, the Michigan Iron, Land & Lumber Company was organized by the Ford Motor Company interests for the Iron Mountain sawmill and body plant, as well as the extensive Ford logging operations in the Upper Peninsula. The officers were Henry Ford, president; Edward G. Kingsford, vice-president and assistant treasurer; Edsel Ford, treasurer; and C.B. Longley, secretary. In March 1923, it officially came under the Ford Motor Company name.

The first “body plant” was built in 1921 and went into operation in March 1922. Later in 1922, this plant was enlarged and a second plant added. A third body plant was built in 1923. By March 1924, the three body plants were making 69 different body parts and producing an estimated 350,000 wooden parts per day.

A chemical or distillation plant that converted the waste wood into wood alcohol, wood tar, gas, oil and charcoal — what would become the Kingsford brand charcoal briquets — went into operation during September 1924. As the Ford operation expanded, the company built the Ford Dam and Hydroelectric Plant on the Menominee River nearby to provide an adequate power supply. The power plant was completed in June 1924.

By early March 1924, Kingsford’s Ford Plant had a total of 52 dry kilns, the largest battery of dry kilns on Earth at the time.

By Nov. 12, 1925, the Iron Mountain plant was listed as employing 7,271 men — more than any other division of the Ford Company with the exception of the Detroit area, according to Cummings.

During 1920, Ford began developing a residential area near Crystal Lake on the company’s property just south of Iron Mountain and built 50 houses, the first of many more Ford eventually built. At the same time other developers began a rush of new subdivisions and home-building on nearby properties.

Voters on Aug. 29, 1923, backed establishment of a separate Village of Kingsford, named for Edward G. Kingsford.

A census by city directory workers employed by R. L. Polk & Co. and completed Dec. 10, 1924, revealed a population of 5,106 in Kingsford and 18,349 in Kingsford and Iron Mountain together. For Iron Mountain itself, this represented a population increase of 5,000 in only four years, according to Cummings.

In August 1923, Ford would make a memorable visit to the Upper Peninsula. As reported by The Iron Mountain News on Aug. 18, 1923, Ford arrived in Escanaba on a luxury yacht, traveling with Thomas Edison and Harvey P. Firestone and his son, Harvey Jr., along with their spouses. E.G. Kingsford was part of the party as well.

“The trip was made here in three Lincoln cars, which conveyed the passengers, and two additional Lincoln supply trucks and a white pantry car. The party carries complete camping equipment. One of the trucks contained nothing but tents and cots which were being set up this afternoon,” according to The News account, which later added, “Each car was driven by a chauffeur and a Japanese cook and helper are also included on the staff.”

Kingsford said they expected to visit all the Ford operations in the Upper Peninsula on the trip, plus parts of the Copper Country stayed for a few days at the Ford Motor company’s private grounds at the Cowboy Lake grove, the Iron Mountain News reported.

The newspaper reported, “By the time the party were ready to come ashore hundreds of people had arrived at the dock and as Thomas Edison stepped across the gangplank the three cheers were given for him as ‘the greatest inventor in the world.’ The grand old man of electricity is very hard of hearing but he knew what it was all about and nodded his pleasure as he made his way to the waiting car.

“‘Hurrah for our next president,’ was the signal for a whole bunch of cheers as Mr. and Mrs. Ford came down the gangplank and went to their car.”

Two other noteworthy Ford operations both were in Baraga County.

In 1923, Ford purchased the entire village of Pequaming for $2,850,000 so the already established lumber mill operation could continue to supply lumber for his vehicles. Ford would maintain a summer home, the Hebard-Ford house, for decades in the community.

In 1935, Ford founded the village of Alberta, naming it after the daughter of the superintendent of Ford’s Upper Peninsula Operations at the time. He considered the location on Plumbago Creek at U.S. 41 to be ideal for a sawmill.

“The sawmill at Alberta, in Baraga County, was to be the core of Ford Motor Company founder Henry Ford’s concept of a model company town. In addition to the Alberta mill facility, Ford also had a dozen or so houses constructed for its employees and their families, along with two schools for the children of the community,” Graham Jaehnig wrote in the Sept. 7, 2025, Daily Mining Gazette.

But the “Ford Boom” of the 1920s would start to fade in a few decades.

During Kingsford’s “Woody and Glider Days,” when the Ford plant made Woody station wagons and Model CG-4A Gliders during World War II, employment dropped to about 3,000, said Guy Forstrom of Quinnesec, who recently donated his extensive collection of Ford and Kingsford charcoal artifacts to the Menominee Range Historical Museum in Iron Mountain.

Because of his love of the U.P., Henry Ford kept the Kingsford facilities running, historians said. But after his death in 1947, son Henry Ford II took over and began investigating the value of the plant.

The Ford Company closed the Kingsford facility in 1951. In its final days, they employed less than 1,000. But the airport still bears the Ford name. And Kingsford High School teams are the Flivvers, a nickname for the Ford Model T that also is the school’s logo.

Ford Motor Company sold the town of Pequaming in 1952. It’s considered essentially a “ghost town” today, though the water tower on the site still has the Ford Motor Company logo and Ford’s former summer home. The house was designated a Michigan State Historic Site in 1979 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982.

Ford operated the Alberta mill until 1954. The company then donated the facility and 1,700 acres of surrounding forest land to Michigan Technological University. It now is Ford Forestry Center, run by MTU’s College of Forest Resources and Environmental Science.

The Committee to Save the Alberta Sawmill had a ribbon-cutting ceremony last September to celebrate reopening the Alberta Sawmill pump house as part of the Baraga County Historical Society Museum.