Excerpt from "My Life and Work"  by Henry Ford and Samuel Crowther 
Project Gutenberg
www.gutenberg.org


I was then on the farm to which I had returned, more because I wanted to experiment than because I wanted to farm, and, now being an all-around machinist, I had a first-class workshop to replace the toy shop of earlier days. My father offered me forty acres of timber land, provided I gave up being a machinist. I agreed in a provisional way, for cutting the timber gave me a chance to get married. I fitted out a sawmill and a portable engine and started to cut out and saw up the timber on the tract.

Some of the first of that lumber went into a cottage on my new farm and in it we began our married life. It was not a big house--thirty-one feet square and only a story and a half high--but it was a comfortable place. I added to it my workshop, and when I was not cutting timber I was working on the gas engines--learning what they were and how they acted. I read everything I could find, but the greatest knowledge came from the work. A gas engine is a mysterious sort of thing--it will not always go the way it should. You can imagine how those first engines acted!