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The 1918
"Vagabonds" (as the campers styled themselves) were Edison, Firestone and his son, Harvey, Jr., Ford, Burroughs, Professor R. J. DeLoach, an expert in plant pathology, and for a time Edward N. Hurley of the
United States Shipping Board. They moved along in six cars-two Packards for riding, two Model
Ts, and two Ford trucks-plus seven drivers and helpers.
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The picture is dulled by age, but the action is lively as Henry Ford swings from the left on a tree destined to provide fuel for the vagabonds' campfire. |
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The 1918 trip covered a lot of ground, for the vagabonds drove from Pennsylvania
down through West Virginia to Tennessee, and then swung over to North Carolina, Virginia, and Maryland, This trip set a pattern for those to follow. In 1919 the party swung through northern New York, Vermont, and New Hampshire. Along the way the group visited a
power site Ford had purchased at Green Island on the Hudson River. A camping trip was omitted in 1920, although the group had a fall outing at Yama Farms, New York. Then the wives demanded a
share in the adventure, and in 1921 a journey through Maryland and
Pennsylvania saw Mrs. Edison, Mrs.
Ford, Mrs.
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Firestone, Mrs. Harvey Firestone, Jr., and Mrs. W. F. Anderson (wife of Methodist Bishop William F. Anderson) with the
party, as well as President Harding. Mrs. Harding had been invited but could not go.
In 1923 the party visited President Coolidge in Massachusetts, and in late April, 1924, on a journey across the upper peninsula of Michigan, Ford acted as engineer and Firestone as fireman for a train which carried the Fords, Edisons,
Fire stones, and Edsel Fords to various Ford properties - Iron Mountain, Sidnaw, and L ' Anse among them. Later in the year all assembled as Ford's guests at the Wayside Inn, in Massachusetts, and the men called upon Coolidge in Plymouth, Vermont, who made Ford a gift of a four gallon maple sap bucket, fashioned about 1780 by one of his ancestors.
The group, as Burroughs noted in his diary, craved direct contact with nature, and
"cheerfully endure wet, cold, smoke, mosquitoes, black flies, and sleepless nights, just to touch naked reality once more." But the party did not exactly rough it. No one slept on a bed of boughs or
subsisted on fish caught in the stream. Separate sleeping tents, each with the
occupant's name on it, were provided, Of the army type, about ten feet square, the tents had mosquito netting flaps sewn in the front and were suspended from what is now called by the camping industry "the modern outside frame system." A dining
tent about twenty feet square, set up convenient to the sleeping tents, was the fore- runner of the "additional room" tent found today.
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