In the fall of 1878, Thomas Edison asked Sarah Jordan, a relative of his wife Mary, to open and operate a boarding house in Menlo Park. Sarah, who moved from Newark, N.J., rented one of two newly constructed identical neighboring duplexes across the street from the laboratory and employed her daughter Ida and a forty-two year old servant, Kate Williams, to staff it. Between 1878 and 1881, at least seventeen laboratory employees took room and board there, and the house also served as a community lunchroom and a center for after-work activity. At least six others boarded in the second duplex, rented by tool makers Charles Dean and William Wright, who lived there with their families. Because the two homes stood so near the laboratory, their inhabitants could easily go to work, especially when needed late into the night, and although Edison owned neither house, the area had the atmosphere and appearance of a small, close knit company village. The Dean house stood directly adjacent to the Jordan house, and the two were essentially identical. They were reportedly among the four houses lighted by Edison’s newly perfected electrical system and incandescent bulb during New Year’s demonstrations on December 31, 1879, and January 1, 1880, with a steam engine in the machine shop driving three direct-current dynamos that supplied current to the bulbs in the laboratory complex and home. After Edison abandoned the Menlo Park laboratory complex, the buildings were used as residences and farm buildings. During the 1910s, most of the laboratory buildings were severely damaged by fire and scavenging by local residents. In 1922, Henry Ford visited the site intending to move the complex to his new museum of Americana, Historic Greenfield Village, in Dearborn, Michigan. Only the laboratory foundations remained then, but the Sarah Jordan Boarding House was still intact, and Ford’s workers dismantled and moved it, along with soil and trash heaps from the laboratory complex. Ford placed the boarding house across from his reconstruction of the Menlo Park laboratory in time for the celebration of Light’s Golden Jubilee in Dearborn on October 21, 1929.
