Finding the Fascinating Ford's Folly

From Dave Brigham:

After easing into the parking lot for Nobscot Conservation Land in Sudbury, Mass., I hiked down a relatively easy path, stones and tree roots here and there adding a small degree of difficulty. Stone walls ran along the path and through the woods, marking off long-ago property lines for farms. I passed a friendly middle-aged couple and their two dogs, as well as an unfriendly youngish dad and his young daughter. The occasional acorn fell through the leaves, bouncing its way to a short-lived freedom. Birds chirped lazily. Critters skittered through the underbrush.

In less than 15 minutes I'd made it from the parking lot on Brimstone Lane, which sounds like it was named by a craggy-faced Colonial minister, to a failed dam built nearly 100 years ago by the man who revolutionized factory production with his assembly line schemes.

In a somewhat posh neighborhood in the southwest corner of town, located in the middle of the woods on the opposite side of Boston Post Road from the famous Wayside Inn, stands the 900-foot-long, stone-and-concrete wall that has come to be known as Ford's Folly. It is named for the industrialist and namesake of the Ford Motor Company, Henry Ford, who had a long and ultimately frustrating relationship with the area.

The dam, which has a fence on each side of a walking path along the top, seems shorter than 900 feet, but is nonetheless quite impressive and such a shock to the mind to see it in the middle of the woods that its length hardly seems to matter. Hop Brook, which Ford had hoped to trap behind the dam to create a reservoir for the nearby village, trickled along on each side of the dam, a pleasant sound of nature that nevertheless likely came to drive Ford mad.

So how did the man who founded and based his car company in Detroit, end up in rural Massachusetts paying for the construction of this damnable dam?

From the Town of Sudbury's web site about the Nobscot land: "In 1923, Ford stepped in to protect the Wayside Inn as a 'splendid example of colonial America.' He purchased nearly 1,500 acres surrounding the Inn and built a traditional New England style white chapel and a field grist mill...in the Wayside Inn area. Ford had a dam built to attempt to create a reservoir for firefighting for the Wayside Inn area....Obsessed with historic authenticity, Ford made sure all construction and renovations were accomplished in 'the traditional manner' using only man and oxen power."

In the early days of the blog, I wrote about my brief visit to the Wayside Inn. But me being a consummate backsider, I didn't write about the inn or even the impressive grist mill on site, but rather a somewhat homely old barn on the property (see October 24, 2011, "Love Barn"). Below are some photos I made at that time of the grist mill.

Anyway...back to the failed dam, again from the Town of Sudbury web site: "It succeeded in holding back only enough water to form a wetland. The reasons given were that the soil is too porous behind the dam, and the feeding stream has very little water most of the year."

I'd love to know who coined the term "Ford's Folly," which I imagine came about many decades ago. Per Wikipedia, a folly in architecture is "a building constructed primarily for decoration, but suggesting through its appearance some other purpose."

According to Atlas Obscura's write-up about the dam, "Ford’s property manager, John Campbell, spent 16 years, from 1930 to 1946, attempting to fix the dam so it would hold water. His efforts can be seen in several large blocks of concrete on the left side at the bottom of the dam. None of them worked and he was forced to abandon the project."

I haven't found a good explanation for why Ford decided to buy the Wayside and so many surrounding acres. The inn's web site offers this: "In 1923, Henry Ford purchased the Wayside Inn....The move was striking for the famous industrialist who just seven years earlier declared that 'history is bunk.' Over the next twenty-four years, Ford not only preserved the Inn, but also moved additional buildings to the site and constructed new ones. Later, he opened the Wayside Inn Boys School where the instructors blended the pedagogical methods from Ford’s childhood with the more progressive 'learning by doing' approach."

I'd read on the Atlas Obscura site that "a wrecked car or two" could possibly be seen at the bottom of the dam, "because local teenagers used to push them off the top." Well, I HAD to check that out.

So I looked over the edge and lo and behold....

...there was a lemon-yellow Dodge Something-or-Other resting in the brook, pulverized from its fall from the top of the dam, a small collapsed tree adding insult to injury.

If there's another car at the bottom of the dam, I didn't see it. My sources who know cars better than I do tell me this one is a Dodge Colt, which Mitsubishi Motors manufactured for Dodge from 1971 to 1994.