After their 1914 Everglades vacation, Ford and Edison embarked on lengthy camping trips nearly every year for the next decade. Also in the museum, we saw one of their vintage picnic baskets and camp stoves.
In 1918, Ford, Edison, Burroughs and Firestone set off on a lengthy camping trip from Pennsylvania to Tennessee through the Great Smoky Mountains. Edison, compass in hand, navigated from his perch in the front seat of the lead touring car. “We never know where we are going, and I suspect that he does not either,” Firestone wrote of the great inventor.
The “Vagabonds” may have slept under the stars, but they were hardly “roughing it.” Edison’s mobile electric generator kept their campsites fully illuminated, and the men slept in personal tents embossed with their names. They traveled in a convoy of chauffeured Ford automobiles with an entourage of cooks and attendants. Among the 50-vehicle caravan on the 1919 camping trip was a specially designed kitchen car, which Burroughs called a “Waldorf-Astoria on wheels,” that featured a gasoline stove and a built-in refrigerator that stored everything from fresh eggs to rib-eye steaks. Inside the spacious dining tent, jacketed waiters placed bowls of food and pitchers of beverages on the lazy Susan that spun around the enormous round camp table capable of seating 20 people.