The town was open to the public, even if they didn’t work for Ford, they could still send their children to the school and daycare center or use the hospital whenever they needed it. He built houses, schools, a hospital, and a factory where 4,000 people became employed. This was the beginning of “Fordlandia”, a town inhabited completely by Ford employees that were in the middle of the Amazon rainforest. He bought a huge 10,000 square KM (3,861 miles) plot of land that contained a rubber plantation. He realized that instead of importing the precious rubber he needed to make his tires, it would be faster and cheaper to build a factory in Brazil. In the 1920s, Henry Ford was manufacturing cars, and there was a high demand for new vehicles. Credit: The New York Times Fordlandia, Brazil Today, the original factory has been turned into a park and a historic landmark that offers tours of the original facilities.
Fifteen years later, the textile industry was so successful, the town grew to a population of 20,000.
In 1820, there were only 200 people living in Lowell. Back then, it was enough money to help pay off their family’s mortgages, or help take care of aging parents. This was the first time in US history that women had an opportunity to make money. These women lived together, and they woke up at 4:30 in the morning to eat breakfast, and they had to start their workday at 5 AM. He hired young single women from the surrounding rural areas of his new town, which he named Lowell, after his last name. He purchased a large piece of property near a waterfall, because it was necessary to power the large looms. This was illegal, of course, but he got away with it and built up his own textile industry when he got back to Massachusetts. According to The Smithsonian, he actually stole some of the designs of their textile machines called “ the power loom“. He wanted to create something similar back in the United States. Built in the 1820s, a man named Francis Cabot Lowell toured factories in England and was mesmerized at their efficiency. In a few cases, these houses became full-on towns, and many of them even still exist to this day. In a lot of cases, factories had to be built far away from towns, which made it necessary for the factory owners to build houses for their employees to live in. The Industrial Revolution brought factories to the world, and production became much faster.
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