Hotel · Dearborn, Michigan · Built 1931; Colonial Homes 1937
The Dearborn Inn
Listed on the National Register as Dearborn Inn and Colonial Homes
Henry Ford's red-brick Georgian Revival hotel of 1931, designed by Albert Kahn across from the Ford Airport to serve air travelers, with five 1937 reproductions of famous Americans' houses built as guest cottages behind it.
History
Henry Ford opened an airport on Oakwood Boulevard in 1924, and from it William Stout's Ford division built the Tri-Motor airliners and ran one of the country's first scheduled airlines. Passengers flying in to visit the Ford company or Ford's new Edison Institute museum and Greenfield Village needed somewhere to stay, so Ford had Albert Kahn design a hotel directly across the road, in a Georgian manner meant to match the museum. A. A. Albrecht built it, with a staff dormitory alongside, since the site was then open farmland. Henry and Edsel Ford hosted an opening reception on July 1, 1931, and the inn opened to the public two days later under the Treadway hotel company. Guests could book sightseeing flights over Detroit in a Tri-Motor. The airport closed to commercial flights in 1933 and became a Ford test track, but the inn remained Dearborn's social center.
In 1934 the inn installed a twelve-zone Carrier system that cooled the whole building, drawing Detroiters escaping summer heat. Edsel Ford, impressed by California hotels with guest cottages, encouraged expansion, and the Treadway architect Charles M. Hart proposed a colonial village of eighteen reproduction houses; five were built in 1937, adding 35 rooms, before the Second World War stopped the plan. During the war local teachers and airport pilots lodged here, the pilots on a first-floor corridor still called Pilot's Row. Motor lodges followed in 1960, and the complex was listed on the National Register in 1982. After restorations in 1987–89 and 2008, the hotel closed in February 2023 and reopened on March 19, 2025.
“In 1934 the Dearborn Inn was a pioneer in hotel air conditioning.”
Architecture
Kahn's inn is a three-story red-brick block with stone trim and quoins under a slate gable roof, its ridge carrying a balustraded deck between end chimneys. A two-story front section with an open arcaded porch below and a balustrade above, seven bays wide between pilasters, holds the main entrance, and two-story flat-roofed wings of guest rooms flank the center; a ballroom rises over the former garage at the rear. The five Colonial Homes copy the exteriors of the Walt Whitman house at Melville, New York, Edgar Allan Poe's cottage at Fordham, the Oliver Wolcott house at Litchfield, Connecticut, and, from historical drawings, the Barbara Fritchie house at Frederick, Maryland, and Patrick Henry's Red Hill in Virginia, with interiors adapted for guests.
What to look for
- Arcaded front porch and balustraded roof deck
- Stone quoins on Kahn's red-brick facade
- The Poe cottage's full-width porch
- The Patrick Henry house with its flanking wings
- The former airfield across Oakwood Boulevard
Setting
The inn sits on a 23-acre lot on Oakwood Boulevard in Dearborn, across from the site of the old Ford Airport, later Ford's test track. The Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village are a short walk away, and Ford Motor Company's world headquarters stands nearby, so the inn belongs to a cluster of buildings shaped by Henry Ford's tastes and money.
Timeline
- 1924Ford Airport opens on Oakwood Boulevard
- 1931Inn opens to the public on July 3
- 1934Whole-building air conditioning installed
- 1937Five reproduction Colonial Homes built
- 1960Motor House buildings added
- 1982Listed on the National Register on December 10
- 2023–2025Closed for restoration; reopened March 19, 2025
Where sources differ
- The nomination calls the inn the first airport hotel in the country; Wikipedia notes that an airport inn at Oakland, California, opened two years earlier.
- The nomination dates the air conditioning to 1934 and the dormitory to 1931; Wikipedia gives 1937 and 1933.
- The nomination says the Colonial Homes added 35 rooms; Wikipedia says 31.
