'Fordlandia' Revisited in Travel Channel Feature on The Henry Ford

Fordlandia, a rubber plantation Henry Ford expected to produce enough rubber to make 2 million tires a year, will be featured on the Travel Channel. (Photo via The Henry Ford Museum)

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The Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn will be featured in an upcoming episode of the Travel Channel’s popular series, “Mysteries of the Museum.”

The museum will be featured on the Friday, Oct. 23, program that airs at 9 p.m. EDT.

The museum includes a historic collection of automobiles and other Americana memorabilia, but among the artifacts are a set of items that were involved in one of Henry Ford’s most audacious gambles — “Fordlandia,” a swath of Brazilian rainforest the famed industrialist acquired in 1927 and envisioned as a booming rubber plantation and town.

Ford expected to be able to produce enough rubber to make 2 million tires a year at the plantation. To ensure its success, Fordlandia offered workers 35 cents a day — high pay at the time for Brazilian workers — as well as food, lodging and health-care, according to a blog post for The Henry Ford Museum.

The problem, though, was an insistence of a 9-to-5 American working schedule and a requirement that the laborers eat food produced in the Midwest, which was foreign to their palates.

The workers resented the behavioral standards Ford imposed and rioted in 1930, and Fordlandia never quite recovered.

A second rubber plantation, Belterra, which enjoyed more success because Ford relaxed the social standards.

The Travel Channel program, hosted by Don Wildman, also includes segments in Chicago on a medical device invented by aviator Charles Lindbergh, and a visit to Harvard University in Cambridge, MA, to inspect a feathered creature that was involved in a case of scientific fraud.