Feral Houses & Fordlandia

Today, I saw the coolest post on Design Sponge about the "feral houses" photo essay from Sweet Juniper. I think it spoke to me for two reasons 1) our feral cat Timo, who is really the sweetest cat once you give him a chance to warm up and 2) the fact that these three houses we bought were feral in their own way when we bought this place. 

After sharing with Dave, he told me about a story he heard on NPR about Fordlandia. Fordlândia ("Ford-land") is a now-abandoned, prefabricated industrial town established in the Amazon Rainforest in 1928 by American industrialist Henry Ford for the purpose of securing a source of cultivated rubber for the automobile manufacturing operations of the Ford Motor Company in the United States. 

Fordlandia, as it turned out, was a huge failure because the ground was infertile, no one from Ford knew how to grow rubber trees and the rules for living there were so severe for the occupants. Ford never even bothered to go there himself. 

There is a new book out about Fordlania by Greg Grandlin entitled Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City. I am excited to get a copy of this book. 

To all things forgotten....