Henry Ford's Amazonian suburbia.

• Author: Dempsey, Mary A.
• Position: Belterra and Fordlandia, Brazil

The lazy towns of Belterra and Fordlandia are all that remain of this auto tycoon's Brazilian venture in rubber production

Belterra sits like a Great Lakes resort, perched above a stretch of sandy beach overlooked by white wooden cottages with green shutters. Wicker chairs rest on verandas, flowers burst from the tidy lawns, and magnificent pines lend aromatic shade. Six decades ago, people here square danced at parties and listened to the poetry of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. But Belterra, built to look like the Great Lakes towns loved by auto pioneer Henry Ford, sits smack in the Brazilian Amazon.

Long gone are the outdoor movie screens that, half a century ago, brought scratchy Hollywood films to workers slashing rubber trees 150 miles south of the equator. Fire hydrants stamped by a Michigan manufacturer still dot the concrete sidewalks. Residents of the sleepy town no longer remember where the library sat, but they point to a weed-choked field as the former nine-hole golf course. More than half a century ago, Model T Fords rolled down these streets and, on a rare occasion, the hospital dispatched its ambulance. Today Volkswagens sit in carports.

Belterra and its sister city, Fordlandia, so deep in the rainforest that it is accessible only by boat, are all that is left of Ford's dream of becoming a rubber baron.

In the early 1900s, Brazilian rubber was used in Model T Ford tires, but the quality was uneven. Better latex came from Asia, where plantations started with Brazilian seeds flourished because they had no natural pests. Some historians say Ford turned to Brazil to break a British-Dutch cartel that held prices high. Others say he simply bristled at importing rubber from halfway around the globe when it thrived in the Americas.

As early as 1923, the U.S. government began surveying Venezuela, Brazil, and spots in Central America to evaluate their potential as rubber sources. A government report by Carl LaRue, a University of Michigan botanist, gave high marks to a plot of land in Brazil near where the Tapajos River dumps its clear waters into the chocolate Amazon. The report ended up in Ford's hands.

Brazilian authorities, hopeful that the auto pioneer could spark another rubber boom like the one that fueled the massive country's economy in the 1800s, granted him 2.5 million acres deep in the Amazon, police protection, and duty-free entry of all Ford equipment and supplies. In exchange for the free land, Ford promised to return 9 percent of the plantation's profits to the local and national governments after twelve years. The 1927 pact marked the first plantation attempt in Brazil, where previously only wild rubber had been tapped, and opened the way for what Ford envisioned as an agro-industrial utopia of workers with "one foot in industry and one foot on the land."

In August 1928 the steamer Lake Ormoc pulling the barge Lake LaFarge - and carrying the infrastructure of a small city - left Dearborn, Michigan, the U.S. headquarters then and now for Ford's auto operations. Four months later, it docked ninety miles upstream from Santarem, Brazil, where hundreds of people working shifts around the clock cleared a patch on a murky, malarial shore of the Tapajos.

Ford officials lived on the Lake Ormoc while workers unloaded motor boats, a steam shovel, a pile driver, tractors, stump pullers, a locomotive, ice-making machines, and crates of food, along with prefabricated buildings, the components of a powerhouse, and a disassembled sawmill. With the equipment, Ford's new firm, the Companhia Industrial do Brasil, was born. The hilly riverbank once dubbed Boa Vista, or good view, was rechristened Fordlandia.

Fenced in by jungle, Fordlandia epitomized modern U.S. suburbia, with rows of snug bungalows fed by power lines running to a diesel generator. Ford rubber workers received double the local hourly wage plus free housing, medical care, and food. Their main...