Deep in Brazil’s Amazon, Exploring the Ruins of Ford’s Fantasyland
400 mileS COLOMBIA Belém Manaus Fordlândia Recife BRAZIL PERU Atlantic Ocean BOLIVIA Pacific Ocean Rio de Janeiro São Paulo
PARAGUAY Belém Manaus Fordlândia Recife BRAZIL BOLIVIA Rio de Janeiro São Paulo Atlantic Ocean ARGENTINA FEB. 20, 2017
From the start, ineptitude and tragedy plagued the venture, meticulously documented in a book by the historian Greg Grandin
that I read on the boat as it made its way up the Tapajós.
Mr. said that This place in Ford’s day was clean, no insects, no animals, no jungle in the town,
Expedito Duarte said that This street was a looters’ paradise, with thieves taking furniture, doorknobs, anything the Americans left behind,
Given the scale of decay and decrepitude in this town — founded in 1928 by the industrialist Henry Ford in the far reaches
of the Amazon River Basin — I didn’t expect to come across the stately, largely well-preserved homes on Palm Avenue.
That finally changed when I boarded a riverboat this year in Santarém, an outpost at the confluence of the Amazon
and Tapajós rivers, and made the six-hour trip to the place where Ford, one of the world’s richest men, tried turning a colossal swath of Brazilian jungle into a Midwest fantasyland.
" Mr. Grandin, the historian, wrote in his account of the town.
that With a surety of purpose and incuriosity about the world that seems all too familiar, Ford deliberately rejected expert advice and set out to turn the Amazon into the Midwest of his imagination,