plants, at Hayden Mills, Cherry Hill, and Clarkston, were constructed. However, the village industry program did not live much longer than Henry Ford himself. The small manufacturing plants were not a financial success, and the stricter accountability procedures implemented after Henry Ford relinquished the presidency in 1945 found that they did not return optimal cost/benefit ratios. Ford Motor Company soon began closing the Village Industries; most of the plants were closed in the 1940s. Only five were still operating in the mid-1950s, three in the mid-1960s, and only a single one, the Ford Valve Plant in Northville, in the mid-1970s. The Northville plant, ironically both the first and last of Ford's village industries, continued in operation until 1981. List of sites There was never a canonical list of sites included in the village industries program, and it is not always clear from the scale, siting, or establishment date of a particular factory whether the site should be considered a "village industry" or simply a small factory. Ford Motor Company itself says that "more than 30 Village Industries plants sprouted throughout Michigan, Ohio, Mississippi, New York and other states." However, contemporaneous accounts describe village industries as being confined to "different points within a 50 mile radius of Dearborn." Thus, many contemporary historians limit consideration to the 18 or 20 sites in southern Michigan that Ford established primarily in the 1920s and 1930s. The following list of sites comes from Howard P. Segal, author of the book Recasting the machine age: Henry Ford's village industries, who lists 19 separate sites. Other historians use a substantially similar list; for example, Mullin includes the same 19 sites, but deprecates Nankin Mills, which he describes as "not actually part of the Village Industries," but "set[ting] the tone for the decentralized village factories that followed. Northville site The Northville plant is located at 235 East Main Street in Northville, Michigan. The site was originally a gristmill built in 1825 and renovated in 1896. A second gristmill was built on this site by the Yerkes family, and later a sawmill was built by the Dubar family. Henry Ford purchased the old gristmill located at this site in 1919. He reconfigured the mill into a valve manufacturing facility by moving machinery in from the Fordson and Highland Park plants, and opened it as the first of the village industries in 1920. Between 1920 and 1936, the plant manufactured