Fordlandia: Henry Ford's Company Town Deep in the Amazon Rainforest
In the 1920s, Ford built an entire Detroit-style suburb in Brazil, hoping to build a workforce to harvest rubber. It never succeeded, and Ford abandoned it.
By Erin Marquis
Published An hour ago
AVEIRO, BRAZIL - JULY 5: A welcome sign on the side of an abandoned factory building near the Fordlandia harbor on July 5, 2017 in Aveiro, Brazil. American industrialist Henry Ford negotiated the rights to 2.5 million acres of land from the Brazilian government to establish a rubber plantation. Construction started in 1926 with the hopes of employing 10,000 workers. By 1945 the project was considered a failure and the land was given back to the Brazilian government.
Photo: Joel Auerbach (Getty Images)
Elon Musk purchased thousands of acres of pasture land outside of Austin with the vision of building Snailbrook, a town (or someday, city) adjacent to Boring and SpaceX facilities already operational or under construction in the area. Ever since Musk announced plans for his updated version of the company town, I’ve been thinking about Fordlandia—a slice of suburban Detroit dropped by Henry Ford, then one of the richest men in the world, deep in the heart of the Amazon rainforest.
Nearly a full century before Snailbrook, Ford struck out to create his own unusual vision for the perfect community–a rubber plantation deep in the dark and mysterious forests of Brazil that would perfectly marry agriculturalism and industrialism to provide a self-actualized workforce. Far from corrupting vices like jazz, speakeasies and cow’s milk, the perfect worker couldn’t help but inevitably spring from the tamed Ford-branded soil.
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A building that housed the machine shop in Fordlandia on July 5, 2017 in Aveiro, Brazil.
Photo: Joel Auerbach (Getty Images)
Because what worked for Ford in Dearborn, Michigan, would obviously work in the Amazon…right? The Amazon, which Teddy Roosevelt described as a green hell when he nearly died on an expedition just 14 years before Ford set boots down in the jungle in 1928. The Amazon, which receives roughly four times the amount of rain that fairly dreary Dearborn gets in a year. Here’s how director Werner Hertzog described it in 1980—35 years after Ford closed up shop for good:
I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and... growing and... just rotting away. Of course, there’s a lot of misery. But it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don’t think they - they sing. They just screech in pain. It’s an unfinished country. It’s still prehistorical. The only thing that is lacking is - is the dinosaurs here. It’s like a curse weighing on an entire landscape. And whoever... goes too deep into this has his share of this curse.
More:
https://jalopnik.com/fordlandia-abandoned-company-town-amazon-rainforest-1850274960
(Follow slideshow of images at the tops of the pages, there are 18, with continuing information.)
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Not a moment too #%@%**&!! soon, was it?
Thank you for taking the time. 
