For a livelier time, check out the Herschell-Spillman Carousel, where you can ride on hand-carved creatures that range from pigs and cats to horses and tigers.

You might also want to take in an 1867 baseball game played by the Lah-de-Dahs, based on an actual team by that name. The year 1867 means no glove and little else in the way of equipment.

In the Edison-at-Work district, you may catch the genius himself at work in his Menlo Park laboratory. From 1876 to 1882, Edison and his assistants created all kinds of doodads and amazements — including the phonograph, electric light, stock ticker, motion picture camera and mimeograph machine — in this very building.

Nearby is the Sarah Jordan Boarding House, where many of the workers lived. It was one of the first buildings in the world to be lighted by Edison's new electrical system. The only problem was that the light switch was across the street in his lab.

You will learn that Edison was only 32 when he invented the incandescent light — the same age as Ford when he invented the Model T and Wilbur Wright when he flew. Such young men to be doing such life-changing things.

Edison remained one of Ford's heroes throughout their lives. And, in fact, honoring Edison's achievements was a prime goal for Ford's museum.

In the Porches and Parlors district of Greenfield Village are more homes of the known and unknown, providing an interesting patchwork of daily life. There are cabins of black slaves and freeholders. There's a plantation house from the tidewater region of Maryland and the pre-Revolutionary War Daggett farmhouse from Connecticut.

There's the birthplace of William Holmes McGuffey, of the elementary school reader fame, as well as a cabin honoring the accomplishments of George Washington Carver, who was into peanuts, among other things.

There's the house where Noah Webster completed his 70,000-word dictionary; there's the house where Robert Frost wrote poems; there's the house where Stephen Foster made music. And just for the heck of it, there's a Cotswold cottage from England that was built in 1620 and taken apart stone by stone to be shipped here. Talk about a broad spectrum of living — you can see it all at Greenfield Village.

But maybe you want to see even more of how life was lived back before the industrial age and the automobile changed it all. Stop by the Working Farm district. Ford never forgot his farming roots and wanted to bring people closer to the soil, livestock and growing things at Greenfield Village.