in other areas of Michigan and across the country. Ford felt that decentralization held many advantages, in particular that managing the comings and goings of a large number of employees at any one site became problematic. One part of this plan was the establishment of small rural manufacturing plants knows as "village industries." The village industries reflected Ford's vision of decentralization: not merely locating factories in different cities or regions of the country, but taking specific production tasks out of the larger factories and moving them to small rural factories. In 1918, Ford made his first purchase of a village industry site when he bought Nankin Mills (now part of Westland, Michigan on the Rouge River. Nankin Mills was in fact familiar to Ford: as a boy he had travelled with his father to the site to grind grain. In 1919, Ford made his second purchase on the Rouge: an old gristmill in Northville, Michigan. The site was again familiar to Ford: he had spent his honeymoon in Northville. Ford planned on building more sites, and so forged an agreement with the Wayne County Road Commission, where the Commission would build hydro dams along the Rouge for Ford's use, in return for receiving the land (and eventually the mills) that Ford had purchased. Ford eventually built six of his village industries at mill sites along the Rouge River. Ford reconfigured the Northland property into a valve manufacturing facility by moving machinery in from the Fordson and Highland Park plants. The Northville Ford Valve Plant was the first village industry to open, in 1919-20. Meanwhile, Ford converted Nankin Mills into a small factory, and in 1920, workers began producing screws. More plants were quickly opened, with three more village industries in Phoenix, Plymouth, and Waterford by 1925. After that, there was something of a lull in the village industry program, with only two new plants, in Flat Rock and Ypsilanti, opened in the next ten years. However, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Ford moved to rapidly expand the village industry concept, opening plants in Tecumseh, Newburg, Dundee, Brooklyn, Saline, Milan, Milford, Sharon Hollow, Willow Run, and Manchester. many of these plants, opening in the middle of the Great Depression, had a profound economic effect on the community, employing dozens or hundreds of workers who would otherwise have been unemployed or have moved away. During World War II, three more