The Great Fordland Collapse: What Happened to Henry Ford’s Town?

Henry Ford was not just a great industrialist – his personality is more accurately compared to Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. A superstar of planetary significance, who really changes the world with his own hands. But even such people make mistakes: in the same row with Windows Millennium, Apple III and the purchase of Twitter stands Fordlandia – a dream city that turned into a dystopia.

It all started with a big theft. In 1976, Englishman Henry Wickham secretly took 70,000 rubber tree seeds from Brazil – a South American endemic that grew only in the Amazon Valley. The loot was sent to the British colonies of Southeast Asia – Ceylon, Java and India. The trees didn’t just take root: freed from natural diseases and parasites, they began to grow rapidly – ​​and by the beginning of the 20th century, Great Britain had become a de facto monopolist of the rubber market, pushing Brazil into the background.

Henry Wickham
National Digital Library Brazil

Hence the shameless price hike, which coincided with an avalanche-like growth in demand for rubber – something similar to what we see today with lithium for battery production. A hundred years ago, the cause of the “rubber fever” was also cars: thus, 3/4 of all rubber supplied to the USA went to the production of tires and various elastic components. And who is responsible for the total motorization of America? That’s right, Henry Ford.

Agree, this is logical: if you own a gigantic industrial empire, why follow the lead of greedy partners? It is simpler and more effective to become your own supplier – plant a rubber tree plantation, and build a town for workers and managers! So in the fall of 1927, Ford made a deal with the Brazilian government: a million hectares of land in the Tapajos River area, a large tributary of the Amazon, in exchange for a share of the annual revenue. It was a classic win-win – but, as history has shown, only on paper.

Henry Ford
Public Domain

The site for the plantation was chosen in the middle of nowhere: no land roads, only river communication – and not always, but only when the water level was favorable. In the fall of 1928, the first ship with builders and materials arrived there – and it turned out to be the only one for the next six months. Quite soon, the team, isolated in the jungle, began to suffer from diseases, food supplies quickly spoiled, and instead of clearing the territory and preparatory work, the matter ended in a mutiny.

In the spring, successful manager Archibald Johnson took charge of the process, and the construction of the city got off the ground. The scale of the undertaking, it must be said, was impressive: in addition to American-style houses, Fordlandia (as the settlement was called) had schools, hospitals, restaurants, stores, a sawmill, a library, a repair shop, a movie theater, and even a swimming pool. Generators produced electricity reliably, and a water tower with the Ford logo proudly towered over all this.

For old Henry, this wasn’t just another manufacturing asset: he wanted to bring the ideals he had successfully cultivated in his native America to another continent. Remember the famous story of how Ford set his workers’ wages at $5 a day, double the accepted rate? A brilliant move that resulted in virtually no turnover at the company’s factories, and the most competent and motivated employees on the payroll. The same was intended for Brazil.

Henry Ford Foundation

Fordlandia residents were offered 35 cents a day, much more than they were used to. In addition, they were provided with free food, housing, and medical care, and the city had everything they needed for a happy life. Tempting? Not the word! But the flow of people entering was almost equal to the flow of people leaving – most workers quit after just a few weeks, forgetting the place like a bad dream.

And all because Ford, to put it mildly, overdid it with imposing his own rules. Let’s start with the food: being a vegetarian, Henry believed that absolutely anyone would be happy with a diet of brown rice, bread, oatmeal and canned peaches. Oh, how wrong he was! The people, offended by such a menu, soon rebelled, cut the telegraph lines and chased the managers and the head chef through the jungle for several days until the Brazilian army came to the rescue. By the way, the approach to nutrition was revised after that – but other problems remained.

Payroll in Fordlandia
Henry Ford Foundation

Fordlandia had a strict daily routine, Brazilians were forced to dance American dances and recite poetry, and tobacco, alcohol and women were strictly prohibited. Compliance was monitored by patrols that had the right to enter any home without warning. However, this issue was resolved simply and effectively: ten kilometers from the city, the “Island of Innocence” appeared with bars, clubs and brothels. Yes, that’s what it was called.

The division into classes did not add any positivity: visiting managers lived separately from local workers – in their own “American Village” with much more elegant and rich buildings. But all of these circumstances paled in comparison to the fact that Fordlandia residents were not allowed to play football. In Brazil. Ban people from playing football. That’s how much Ford did not understand local realities.

Henry Ford Foundation

And even that was not the main mistake. The same mayor Archibald Johnson, who had no experience in agriculture, was responsible for the cultivation of the plantation. The first thing he did was cut down the jungle to plant trees – but the top layer of soil was simply washed away by tropical rains. They had to do everything again and build a complex system of fortified terraces.

Rubber trees themselves grow widely spaced in the wild to avoid pathogens, fungi, and insects—but Johnson planted them in dense, orderly rows, and thereby doomed them. Fordlandia was supposed to be able to produce enough rubber to put on two million cars a year—but five years after its founding, it hadn’t produced a drop. Something had to change.

Henry Ford Foundation

Surprisingly, this time they turned to a man who knew what to do – agronomist James Weir. In short, his verdict was: “It’s all crap, let’s start over.” A new plot was selected for cultivation 150 km downstream of the Tapajos River – with more fertile soil and much better accessibility. At the same time, Weir paid the British monopolists back in their own coin, stealing rubber tree seedlings resistant to diseases and parasites from the plantations of Ceylon. By 1936, a new settlement appeared in these places – Belterra.

James Weir
Henry Ford Foundation

Things are finally starting to improve: over the next five years, the population of Belterra increases to 2,500 people, while Fordlandia, originally designed for 10 thousand, has less than five hundred left. In 1942, rubber juice production finally begins in Belterra: 750 tons were squeezed out in a year. Impressive? Only if you don’t remember that Ford’s plan assumed 38,000 tons annually. World War II didn’t help the process either, and when it ended, humanity had mastered synthetic rubber on an industrial scale, and the need for Ford’s own plantation simply disappeared. In 1945, Henry sells it to the Brazilian government for 250 thousand dollars — and this with a total investment of more than 20 million. Those, a hundred years ago. In today’s money, that’s almost half a billion…

Belterra still exists today: the plantation still produces natural rubber, but it is used more for scientific than commercial purposes. Fordlandia stood virtually abandoned for several decades – people simply left, leaving even their silverware behind. There were not even a hundred permanent residents. But at the beginning of the 21st century, people began to flock to these places again, and now the town’s population is about 3,000 people. Some houses, a hospital, a warehouse-workshop, and a sawmill have been preserved.

Nicolas Cabrera

And above all this, a water tower with a faded Ford logo still rises – as a warning that the brightest and most utopian ideas are doomed to failure without a thorough study of local features. /m

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