The Henry Ford Blog

***Updated July 13, 2010***

Richard Jeryan is a volunteer in Greenfield Village and is dedicated to the Weaving Shop and its Team. Here’s an article from Handwoven Magazine from May/June 2008 about Richard and how he helped restore the Jacquard Loom in Liberty Craftworks.

Handwoven Magazine May/June 2008 Issue
An Industrialist and His Looms

Henry Ford couldn’t have foreseen how saving his boyhood home from being demolished would lead to the establishment of one of the largest living history museums in the country. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, Ford, the founder of Ford Motor Company, started collecting America’s past. Starting with some McGuffey Readers, his collection soon grew. In 191, he saved the family home from being demolished by a road expansion, thus performing his first act of historic preservation, an act he would play out in earnest ten years later by establishing what would become The Henry Ford.

Jeanine Head Miller, Curator of Domestic Life at The Henry Ford, notes that “Ford collected the tools and buildings that represented the way of life he had known as a child – a way of life that had been dramatically changed by industrial innovation, including Ford’s own invention of the Model T. He collected broadly and deeply. For instance, Ford didn’t acquire just a few pieces of textile equipment, but hundreds.”

Today, Greenfield Village is spread out over more than 90 acres that are divided into seven districts. As an industrialist, Ford was intrigued by the efficiencies of mass production, but he also valued the craftsmanship involved in producing everyday goods, from cars to the flour used to bake the family bread. Greenfield Village pays homage to early American manufacturing in the Liberty Craftworks district by preserving old mills and offering demonstrations by skilled artisans weaving, potting and blowing glass.

Ford’s Loom
In the late 1920s, Ford established a private, tuition-free school on the grounds of the museum and village to educate youth based on his creed of “learning by doing.” The children were encouraged to use the equipment in the village and try their hands at a wide range of crafts from woodworking to weaving. In 1934, a timber-framed loom with a jacquard head was built to sit among the many others that were brought to the village. It is this Loom that caught Richard Jeryan’s eye.

Richard Jeryan spent his career at Ford motor Company as an engineer researching the use of structural fiber-reinforced composites. At the most basic level, these are the fabrics woven of glass, carbon, or Kevlar fiber and impregnated with plastic resin to create stiff material from which, among other things, cars can be made. Jeryan’s mother was a seamstress and his father a metal fabricator. He grew up with a respect fro materials and the means of making them into useful objects. In 1980, drawn to the mechanical nature of the loom and skill involved in making cloth, Jeryan learned to weave, which eventually lead him to volunteer at Greenfield Village.

In 2006, Jeryan, along with fellow volunteer Tim Brewer, set about restoring the Jacquard loom that had sat unused for years. Piece by piece, Jeryan and Brewer disassembled the head and researched the technology of antique looms. The loom will be in action weaving a blue-and-white sampler featuring a pattern from a mid-nineteenth century Indiana doubleweave coverlet called Frenchman’s Fancy of the million-and-a-half visitors expected to tour the Village in 2008.

Here are some other interesting facts:

• The Jacquard loom was patented in 1803.
• Our loom is one of only two operational Jacquard hand looms in public museums in the U.S.
• It can weave figured and fancy fabrics like coverlets, damask, paisley shaws and ornate labels for clothing.
• The Jacquard loom revolutionized weaving and cloth production in 1803 – these looms are still used every day, but they’re now computer-driven power looms.
• The loom use punch cards to create the designs – these cards were the inspiration for IBM’s computer punch cards/beginning of digital storage data.