Money Men, Misdemeanors, and Motorcar Makers: The Uncompromising Vision of Henry Ford and Those He Left Behind

The Michigan Historical Review 42.2 (Fall 2016): 81-96©2016 Central Michigan University. ISSN 0890-1686 All Rights Reserved Money Men, Misdemeanors, and Motorcar Makers: The Uncompromising Vision of Henry Ford and Those He Left Behind By Douglas P. Gleason In August 1932 newspapers across the country picked up the story of the death of Albert Strelow, a retired building contractor from Detroit. One called him a “man who came into considerable fame because of the money he didn’t make.”1 But the story began nearly thirty years earlier when, in the spring of 1903, Strelow built a modest wood-frame assembly plant for a newly-formed motor car company within a few yards of his own house.2 Affixed to the side of this otherwise unexceptional building was a long sign that read “FORD MOTOR COMPANY” in handpainted block letters. Strelow would also invest $5,000 in the new company and received a five-percent stake in this venture that, though uncertain at the time, was soon to become one of the world’s great industrial wonders. Four years later, Strelow sold his stock to fellow Ford investor and future US Senator James Couzens for $25,000. Though that may have seemed like a handsome profit at the time, had he waited just three more years he would have realized ten times that amount in dividends alone. And had he waited until 1919, when Henry and Edsel Ford bought out the remaining minority stockholders, his $5,000 would have earned him more than $17 million–nearly $1 billion in today’s money.3 As one newspaper noted when he died, it meant Albert Strelow “would have been one of the world’s richest men.”4 Historian Robert Lacey has described the timing of Strelow’s departure from Ford as “one of the greatest miscalculations of business 1 The Joplin Globe, 19 August 1932. Albert Strelow was the author’s great grandfather. 2 Most often misidentified as an old wagon shop or ice house converted for Ford’s use, the so-called Mack Avenue plant was actually a new building constructed by Strelow expressly for Ford Motor in April 1903. This is substantiated by a Sanborn fire insurance map showing Strelow’s property in 1897 and a building permit ledger from 1903, both from the collections of the Detroit Public Library. 3 Conversion taken from MeasuringWorth.com, The University of Illinois. 4 The Joplin Globe, 19 August 1932. 82 The Michigan Historical Review history.”5 Only one explanation has been offered for his apparently rash decision and it has persisted for more than a century. It first appeared as a brief aside in a 1915 New York Sun article heralding the “phenomenal profits” of the remaining Ford Motor stockholders and was later picked up by Allen L. Benson in his 1923 book The New Henry Ford, after which it became firmly established through sheer repetition. The story goes that Strelow was eager to invest in a gold mine in “far away British Columbia.” In need of capital, he sold his Ford stock and took off for Canada where, over the next ten years, he lost everything he had in what turned out to be a barren prospect. He is said to have returned to Detroit to take a job on the Ford Motor assembly line. This would explain why Strelow sold out just as the company was beginning its meteoric rise to industry dominance, except for one thing—it is largely untrue. Though Strelow did invest in a gold mine, he launched that venture three years before he sold his Ford stock, and the mine was not in “faraway British Columbia” (nor in the Yukon, where some subsequent authors have placed it) but rather a few miles above the Minnesota state line.6 Though Strelow visited the mining site twice for inspection, in 1903 and 1905, he otherwise seemed to have rarely even left Detroit for any length of time. He journeyed to Lansing in 1909 as part of a delegation of summer cottage property holders lobbying for rights to obtain title to land in the St. Clair Flats, a cluster of small islands in Lake St. Clair...

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