The Rouge Story

In one Place, in one day

For most of the 20th century, they came to wonder at the Rouge – heads of state, industrialists (including engineers of other automakers), hundreds of thousands of children on school trips, and, of course, reporters. They all came to the only place on earth where they could see the entire auto making process in one day, in one place.

There was no other place else on earth where you could see the entire process in a single industrial complex. Giant freighters unloaded ore and cola at one end which went into ovens to make coke, steel and, in another plant, glass; then the materials formed into parts, panel stampings, and engines; and finally everything came together on the assembly line and at the other end, a completed car was started and driven away.

EVERYTHING IN ONE PLACE
The Ford Motor Company River Rouge complex was the largest manufacturing centre owned by a single company. Located a few kilometres south of Detroit, on the Rouge River, a tributary of the Detroit River, the Rouge complex was originally 2.5 kms wide and more than 1.6 kms long. The multiplex of buildings totaled 1,465,618 square metres of floor area and almost 200 kms of conveyors. There were ore docks, steel furnaces, coke ovens, rolling mills, glass furnaces and plate-glass rollers, tyre-making plant, stamping plant, engine casting plant, frame and assembly plant, transmission plant, radiator plant, tool and die plant, a powerplant producing enough electricity to light a city the size of nearby Detroit, a soy bean conversion plant making plastic auto parts, and, at one time, even a paper mill. Ford also made its own tyres there.

The Rouge had its own railroad with 160 kms of track and 16 locomotives, a scheduled bus network, and 25 kms of paved roads, to keep everything and everyone on the move. A city without residents, at its peak, more than 100,000 people worked at the Rouge. To accommodate them required a multi-station fire department, a police force, a fully-staffed hospital, and 5,000-member maintenance crew.

More than 6,000 tons of iron were smelted a day, 500 tons of glass made daily… one new car was produced every 49 seconds… and 3,500 mops replaced each month to keep the complex astonishingly clean.

VERTICAL INTEGRATION
Yet even superlatives failed to encompass the true meaning of the Rouge. For the complex was only the hub of a wheel that enveloped half the globe. The concept at the core was called “vertical integration,” – total self-sufficiency by owning, operating and coordinating, all resources needed to produce complete automobiles.

Ford Motor Company owned 700,000 acres of forestland, iron mines and limestone quarries in far Northern Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and tens of thousands of acres of coal-rich land in West Virginia and Pennsylvania. Henry Ford even purchased and operated a rubber plantation in Brazil to have a secure supply of rubber for making tyres. To bring all these materials to the Rouge, Ford operated a fleet of ore freighters, and an entire regional railroad company – all feeding into the Rouge. Continuous flow – “from earth to assembly” as it was called – was at the objective of Ford’s quest for vertical integration. In Henry Ford’s words, the idea was to achieve “a continuous, non-stop process from raw material to finished product with no pause even for warehousing or storage.”

But, in reality, vertical integration was never entirely achieved. At no time, for example, did Ford have fewer than 6,000 suppliers serving the Rouge. Yet it came closer to the concept than any other industrial concern had before or since.

“Fordismus” was the word coined by the German engineers who came to America in the early 1920s to study Ford’s approach. Designing for flow and efficiency would become the standard of global industry, and the precursor of modern just-in-time manufacturing which the Japanese later refined.

EVOLUTIONARY DEVELOPMENT
The story of the Rouge, however, was not one of a master vision with a single grand execution. The Rouge was perceived and pieced together by Henry Ford, a shirtsleeves tinkerer who typically said: “Let’s try that and see how it goes.”

The Rouge represented a long succession of “let’s-try-it” decisions. The first came with Henry Ford’s purchase of the land not far from his childhood home in Dearborn, Michigan, the same marshlands where he hiked and watched birds as a boy. Ford began buying the land that was to become the Rouge in 1914. In total, he acquired a 2,000-acre stretch of bottomland along the Rouge River. By the time he purchased this tract of land, Ford already had achieved much with his astute sense of innovation.

His goal of producing a car that working men and women could afford had evolved through several false starts. After two failed attempts at starting an auto company, he finally established Ford Motor Company in 1903. For the next five years, he went through an alphabet soup of models before developing the Model T. By 1915, Henry Ford had literally “put the world on wheels”; at that time and in the years that followed, more than half of all the cars on the planet nearly identical Ford Model Ts.

To drive down the price of his Model T, Ford refined the well-established concept of a moving assembly line, a concept he saw being used in the meat industry. Thousands of improvements were made to the sequential line concept and he made so many refinements over so long a period that no one could point to the precise time when Ford’s moving assembly line was born.

The Rouge River property was not earmarked for any particular use. Ford had even considered turning the land into a large bird sanctuary. Yet during World War I, Undersecretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt contracted with Henry Ford to use his construction genius to build the Eagle Boats – also known as submarine chasers – torpedo boats and later PT Boats. A three-storey structure, Building B, was erected in 1917 on the Rouge site to build the boats. Building B was the first substantial Rouge building and serves today as part of the Dearborn Assembly Plant. While the war ended before the Ford Eagle Boats ever went into action, the effort did allow widening of the Rouge River substantially, presenting the possibility of bringing ore boats up the river.

SELF-SUFFICIENCY
The war also served to demonstrate just how vulnerable Ford Motor Company was to supply shortages. The Highland Park plant had suffered a number of work stoppages because of failures of suppliers to deliver parts. So Ford decided he would make his company self-sufficient.

However, there was another motivation: Ford needed to continuously reduce costs in order to drive down prices. “If those who sell to us will not manufacture at prices which, upon investigation, we believe to be right, then we will make the articles ourselves,” Ford said.

The Rouge shipyard soon became the destination of the massive lake freighters filled with ore, coal, rubber, and lumber to supply the Highland Park Plant and later, the Rouge. Next came huge coke ovens and blast furnaces in 1919. The foundry provided iron, steel, brass and bronze castings. The foundry alone covered 30 acres and was, at its inception, the largest foundry on earth.

Ford added an immense powerhouse in 1920, which from its first day provided power to both the Rouge and Highland Park. There was so much electricity to spare that Ford provided the city of Detroit a million kilowatts of excess power every day.

A glass-making plant was built in 1923. Ford was the first to use laminated safety glass in car windscreens, beginning with the Model A, and he needed a facility equal to producing it. The new plant rolled out over 20 kms of glass each day.

But while the Rouge would eventually add production of virtually every Model T component including the engine block, actual assembly of the legendary car remained at Highland Park.

The first vehicles to actually be assembled in the Rouge were not cars but farm tractors. No sooner had Henry Ford achieved low-cost transportation with the Model T than he set his sites on doing the same for the world’s farmers. The Fordson, the first mass-produced tractor, was in full production at the Rouge beginning in 1920.

The Rouge achieved its distinction of automotive “ore to assembly” in 1927 with the long awaited introduction of the Model A. Building B would be the home of assembly
operations from that time forth. Most of these buildings, and several hundred more in the Ford empire, were designed by Albert Kahn, the most renowned architect of his day. While the buildings were designed pragmatically for their manufacturing function, Kahn managed to add a sense of light and air. When the Rouge glass plant was opened, for example, the heavily glass upper walls and ceiling were celebrated as “the single factory that carries industrial architecture forward more than any other.”

By 1928, the complex was complete, yet never settled. As soon as a more efficient machine or process was found, the old equipment was ripped out and replaced. As one Rouge plant engineer said at the time: “It doesn’t matter what the equipment cost to install or how long it has been in operation. We tear out whole departments to make one or two new changes.”

Those who toured the Rouge were especially struck by the entire complex’s cleanliness. Every floor was scrubbed clean, every wall recently painted, every window sparkled, every locomotive glistened as if on display. Henry Ford demanded absolute cleanliness, and in anticipation of an announced visit, plant managers would close down their entire operations for a day to have everyone cleaning and painting.

RECYCLING WASTE
One of the great evils of the world, in Henry Ford’s estimation, was waste. Ford recycled or found new uses for virtually all waste products. Waste gas from his coke ovens was used to make tar, benzol, gas for lighting, and other chemical byproducts. Thirty tons of ore dust produced every day was reprocessed and used. And furnace slag was used as an ingredient in concrete for Ford’s building projects. Ford is also credited for inventing the charcoal used in backyard barbecues, entirely because he wanted to find a use for growing piles of wood scraps.

In 1947, at the pinnacle of the Rouge’s success, Henry Ford died.

A NEW EVOLUTION
Ford Motor Company began a new evolution that militated against industrial concentration on the scale of the Rouge. It had grown into a highly decentralized world company. Within 15 years of its founding, Ford had manufacturing plants in Canada, Europe, Australia, South America, China, and Japan. Henry Ford insisted his company “build them where you sell them” and both local content and in-country assembly became Ford’s global norm. By the beginning of World War II, Ford had production facilities in 35 states and in nearly 23 countries on five continents.

Henry Ford II and his new team of “whiz kid” managers continued to fully employ the Rouge through the late 1960s, yet they operated in a distinctly different world than had Henry Ford. For one, there was a growing awareness of the environment. In the early days of American industrialization, smoke rising from a stack was a positive sign of full employment and manufacturing prowess. As industry matured, government and manufacturers alike became aware that black smoke had other implications – and they were not positive.

Air and water quality standards were developed by government agencies. The more facilities located within a community and accumulatively added to emissions, the more stringent the controls. This, in part, led to the closure of some older facilities. It is improbable that another complex like The Rouge – the largest single industrial complex in the world – would ever be created.

The company began concentrating on what it knew best: its core business of car and truck production. The company grew to rely more and more on an ever-increasing cadre of suppliers, and to methodically extract itself from other fields such as mining, lumbering and glass-making. In 1981, steel-making operations at the Rouge became part of a new and independent company.

The number of operations and jobs at the Rouge dropped. Economic pressures mounted to retire old manufacturing facilities and to replace them with state-of-the-art ‘greenfield’ plants (factories built in new locations). Yet the Rouge had evolved into more than a concentration of metal and mortar. It had become a community with a strong sense of its own identity. Generation after generation had worked in the Rouge, and few in the hourly or salaried ranks were willing to walk away from their heritage.

That fact became clear in 1992 when the only car still built at the Rouge, the Ford Mustang, was about to be eliminated and assembly operations in Dearborn Assembly terminated. The UAW chapter, in cooperation with Alex Trotman, then president of Ford’s North American Operations, set out to keep the Mustang in production, and to keep production in the Rouge. ‘Save the Mustang’ became synonymous with ‘Save the Rouge’. Working together, the company and the UAW established a modern operating agreement and fostered numerous innovations to increase efficiency and quality. The company, for its part, would redesign and reintroduce the Mustang, and invest in modern equipment.

The Rouge made its comeback in 1997. The UAW chapter and the company approved the Rouge Viability Agreement, and the Ford Board of Directors agreed to modernize the company’s oldest and largest manufacturing complex. The first efforts focused on extensive renovations to the Dearborn Engine and Fuel Tank Plant and other plants at the Rouge, and an environmentally-advanced paint operation in the Dearborn Assembly Plant. Also, plans called for CMS Energy to develop an entirely new power plant by 2000.

The Rouge entered the new millennium humbled by disaster and downsizing, yet still an industrial giant. Today, more than 7,000 Ford employees work at the Rouge in assembly, stamping, frame, tool and die, and engine plants. Rouge Steel Company employs another 3,000 people. Now called the Ford Rouge Centre, the site remains Ford Motor Company’s largest single industrial complex.