Schuyler Mill-Ford Soybean Plant Complex

Since 1845 a mill building has stood on a hill, near where the Saline River crosses the Old Chicago Road, later U.S. 12. It has become a landmark integrally linked with the City of Saline. The changing uses of the area surrounding the mill reflected the changes in the larger community. In 1845 when the mill was constructed, the area became a focal point for the farmers from the hinterland, and the mill thus sped the development of the commercial town of Barnegat. An improvement in the highway eventually united the communities of Barnegat and Saline. A great demand for the services of the mill continued, and in 1865 a new owner added a third story and an additional wing to the building. Soon after, though, business began to decline, and the mill seemed destined to slowly deteriorate. Yet ironically, the mill was rescued because it represented the virtues of a bygone era and place, at least to Henry Ford, who had helped usher in the modern era of mass production that had threatened much small town industry. Ford looked to Saline and eleven other small towns in southeast Michigan as places to establish his Village Industries Program, an attempt to recover the rural simplicity and simple morality which he believed had been lost in the changes he had initiated. In 1938 the Saline mill re-opened alongside a newly-built soybean extractor plant.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Henry Ford began an experiment in the development of small industrial complexes in rural areas and towns of Michigan. In some cases he built mills to house the industries, but at other times he used pre-existing nineteenth-century mills. Among these, Schuyler Mill in Saline became the site for one of Ford's 'village industries,' one that would use the soybeans from nearby farms to manufacture plastics for the automobile industry. The Schuyler Mill/Ford Soybean Plant Complex was situated in a park-like setting of trees and manicured lawns located along both sides of U.S. 12 at the western limits of Saline. On a prominent point to the south of U.S. 12, a large, mid-nineteenth-century grist mill in the Greek Revival style commands a view across the highway to lawns that sweep to the northeast where they meet the shore of a large mill pond. Set upon this expansive lawn is a modern Greek Revival-inspired house built around an 1856 one-room, Greek Revival school building which Ford moved to the site in 1943.