GS - Brooklyn Mill Traditional Cache
Couzan: Sorry, the location this cache was placed was bulldozed last week. I’ll work with the owner on a new place as this is an iconic place.
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Size: 
(small)
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Columbia Area Girl Scouts use this find as part of their Geocaching badge and are the FTF.
This was the site of the original mill that Reverend Calvin Swain built in 1834 from which the town of Brooklyn grew. In 1912, the same year that Girl Scouts was founded, the Mill burned down. Nine years later, Henry Ford bought the property.
The Ford Plant was built in 1938 and became a major employer for the Brooklyn area both during the build and after. In fact, one of our Girl Scouts mentioned that her grandpa worked there when we were placing it.
Ford was a good employer that paid top wages. These “city wages” in rural areas made workers happier, he said, which meant less turnover and better quality workmanship.
The idea, Ford is quoted as saying at the time, was not to draw men from the farms but to add industry to farming. It worked, said Robert Wahr, 84, of Brooklyn who went to work at the Brooklyn plant at age 18 and eventually became a foreman.
“Farmers worked there in the winter and in their fields in the summer,” Wahr said. “It was a good place to work because you knew everyone in town that worked there and everyone worked together to get the job done. When you go to a big plant, that’s not always the way it goes.”
In 1942, the Brooklyn plant shifted to wartime production, making parts for B-24 bombers. After the war, it made distributors and supplied 50 percent of Ford’s horn buttons and starter switches for cars and trucks.
The property was sold to Jackson Gear Co. in October 1967 for the production of brake parts for heavy-duty trucks. In the mid-1980s, it began phasing out its Brooklyn operations and production ended there in 1987 when the company consolidated in Livonia.
Today, Dan Ross, owner of Napoleon Township’s TransPharm PreClinical Solutions, owns the building and hopes to turn it into a culinary and recreation destination called the Old Irish Mill.
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
Fcyvg gur qvssrerapr naq sbyybj vg "qbja."
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