You’ll Never Guess Where Henry Ford Is Buried
His final resting place is across the street from a bus stop and brightly lit Sunoco station
Dearborn — You don't have to be a Michigander to know the name Henry Ford.
Ford Motor Company. The Model T. Moving assembly line. Sound familiar?
In Dearborn, Ford's legacy lives on at his beloved Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village, a massive 250-acre history complex that attracts visitors from around the world.
The museum is home to some of the most iconic artifacts in American history, and Greenfield Village feels like you’re in a completely new town and preserves nearly 100 historic structures from some of our nation's household names.
With all of that, you'd probably expect his burial site to be just as extravagant. Perhaps a massive shrine to the industrialist who put the world on wheels and created the modern world. An enormous mausoleum for an enormous personality.
Well, turns out it’s pretty much the opposite.
He’s buried just a few miles down the road on a totally unremarkable stretch of Joy Road. Across the street from a gas station. It’s a modest grave in a modest cemetery, and you’d never guess that that’s where Henry Ford rests.
Henry, his wife Clara, and several other members of the Ford family are all buried at Ford Cemetery, a small family cemetery with only 60 or so graves that sits hidden in the grounds of St. Martha's Commons beside St. Martha's Episcopal Church, which Clara Ford built in memory of her mother.
Unless you know exactly where to look, you'll probably drive right past it. Even then, it was pretty hard to find.
And once you’re there, the view is nothing to write home about. I found the graves themselves lovely, well kept, and clearly cared for, but there's a brightly lit cobalt Sunoco gas station sitting directly across the street, making it a little hard to focus on anything else. A bus stop is there, too. It feels eerily casual for being the resting place of one of Michigan's most famous historical figures.
When Ford died on April 7, 1947, the city of Detroit practically shut down. More than 100,000 people came to pay their respects, making it one of the largest funerals in the city's history. Gas stations closed, public transportation stopped, and Ford facilities around the world temporarily shut down as everyone came to honor the industrialist who helped reshape America. And now all of that history leads down to this small plot of land across the street from a gas station and a bus stop.
The location isn't the only thing that makes this an unusual site, though. Henry and Clara Ford's graves are also both covered by a cage-like metal structure known as a “mortsafe.”
This device was originally designed to prevent grave robbers from stealing newly buried bodies for ransom, expensive jewelry, medical research, or God knows what other reasons.
But despite the massive funeral and all the precautions taken to keep his grave safe, today the site sees very few visitors.
And while hundreds of thousands of people visit Greenfield Village and the Henry Ford Museum each year to learn about Henry Ford and his legacy, the man himself rests quietly just a few miles down the road.
