More than 140,000 people have bought tickets to watch pickups being assembled since the Ford Rouge Factory in Dearborn, Mich., opened to visitors in May.

It's one of the biggest automotive plants in America open for tours, but even so, I just didn't get it. Who cares how they're made, as long as they start every morning?

But the tour, it turns out, is more than bumpers and fenders. It's about America's history and the industrial complex that changed the way the world does business.

The Rouge plant was once the largest in the world, a city unto itself, with 100,000 employees, its own hospital, railroad, fire station, police force, giant company store and shipping docks. People emigrated from around the world to line up for jobs with Henry Ford, who figured his business would boom if he paid his workers enough to buy his product. The middle class was mass-produced here, along with the vehicles that opened the nation to travel — and to suburbanization. Artists such as Diego Rivera, Margaret Bourke-White, Walker Evans, Charles Sheeler and Michael Kenna came here to capture on film and canvas what they understood was a revolution.

The Rosa Parks bus was purchased by the Henry Ford Museum in 2001. After paying more than $400,000 for the rusted shell, the museum spent another $318,000 restoring it.

The opening of the factory to tours came as the nearby Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village completed a $200 million renovation. Greenfield Village, which re-creates 19th-century American life, is on the scale of Virginia's Colonial Williamsburg, but it includes the opportunity to tour in a Model T, a horse-drawn carriage, a steam-engine train or a paddlewheel boat.

The museum focuses on the creativity and technological genius of American industry, but it includes a diverse collection of Americana — from the chair, still bloodstained, that Abraham Lincoln was sitting in when assassinated, to the bus that Rosa Parks was riding when her refusal to move rocked the country, and the world.

And a room-size mural by Rivera has found a permanent home at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Inspired by the plant and commissioned by Ford, the mural is considered the Mexican artist's best.

Seldom do industry, art and history come together in one neat package. Think of it as the Full Ford experience. Here's a rundown:

Henry Ford Museum

Getting around Greenfield Village and all things Ford are accessible by walking if you stay at the Dearborn Inn. Otherwise, this place was built by and for cars, and you'll need one. Downtown Detroit is about a half-hour drive from the village complex. Within 15 minutes of the village, you'll find the largest Arab population outside the Middle East — and some of the best Middle Eastern food in the United States. Museums • The Henry Ford Museum (20900 Oakwood Blvd., Dearborn) is next door to Greenfield Village. Museum-only admission: $14. Village: $20. Rouge Factory Tour: $14. A package of any two is $26; all three, $48. Links to all Ford-related attractions, including prices and directions, are at www.henryfordmuseum.com or call: 313-982-6100. • The Detroit Institute of Arts is at 5200 Woodward Ave., Detroit: call: 313-833-7900 or see www.dia.org Lodging Find tickets-and-room packages at 50 hotels at www.henryfordmuseum.com. The most convenient choice, with a quaint, special feel, is the Dearborn Inn (20301 Oakwood Blvd., 800-MARRIOTT). Weekend rates, cheaper than weekday, start around $95 per night. Restaurants • Middle Eastern: If you visit the area and skip the many Middle Eastern restaurants, you've missed the best part. I've never had a bad meal at any Dearborn Lebanese restaurant, but I keep returning to La Shish (22039 W. Michigan Ave., Dearborn). Other locations can be found at www.lashish.com. New Yasmeen Bakery (13900 W. Warren) has great sandwiches and salads in addition to baked goods and desserts. • Greek: In Detroit's Greektown, Laikon Cafe (569 Monroe Ave.) and Hellas (583 Monroe St.) are two favorites. But all the restaurants are more dependably delicious than you'd find wandering into a restaurant in Greece. Sandwiches start at under $5, and entrees under $10. • Soul food: Southern Fires (575 Bellevue St., Detroit) serves huge portions of first-rate down-home cooking in a renovated warehouse. Fried chicken, catfish, smothered steak and meatloaf start at $7.95 and come with two big sides and cornbread. More information Detroit Metro Convention & Visitors Bureau, 800-DETROIT or www.visitdetroit.com

It's amazing the stuff you can buy when money is no object.

Ford, the world's first billionaire, collected whatever struck his fancy. He bought old machines and entire buildings of historic note. A great admirer of Thomas Edison, Ford asked Edison's son to capture the famed inventor's last breath in a test tube — which is now among thousands of artifacts at the Henry Ford Museum.

The museum and Greenfield Village complex opened in 1929 as an institute of learning for students and scholars exclusively. The public considered it a mysterious and perhaps wondrous place they yearned to see.

"It was like Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory," museum spokesman Andrew Johnson says. People would walk or drive by the fenced compound near the plant and conjecture about what was inside. By popular demand, the museum and village were opened to all in 1932.

The museum has many cars, including vintage autos and cars famous because of the people they carried. Every presidential limo is housed here, including the 1961 Lincoln in which President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963.

Also on display are planes and trains, bikes and washing machines, baby buggies and vacuum cleaners, and a particularly ingenious prefab house designed by Buckminster Fuller.

A quote from Ford explains the focus of what might first seem an eclectic collection: "When I went to our American history books to learn how our forefathers harrowed the land, I discovered that the historians knew nothing about harrows," Ford said. "Yet our country has depended more on harrows than on guns or speeches. I thought that a history which excluded harrows and all the rest of daily life is bunk and I think so yet."

For me, the museum's most moving piece is the bus Rosa Parks rode on the day she refused to give up her seat. Even years after the 1955 incident shook the country, Montgomery, Ala., had no clue about the significance of that little bus. City transit officials took it out of service in 1971 and sold it to a guy who threw the seats down a ravine to make more room for his tools. Wild animals eventually moved in, and passing Bubbas used it for target practice.

Finally someone realized its historic value and put it on the auction block. The Smithsonian had already decided where it would put it but was outbid by the Ford museum. After paying more than $400,000 for the rusted shell, the museum spent another $318,000 restoring it.

A tour guide points out the seat Parks was sitting in on that seminal day in American civil-rights history. Visitors take turns moving into that seat, as if it were a hallowed place, perhaps as if they could experience what a seamstress might have felt that day as she defied a system enshrined in both custom and law.

The Rouge Plant

When Ford Motor designed its new plant for F150 pickups, it included two theaters and a visitors' observation deck. Visitors entering the plant first see a film that used a vast archive of historic documents to re-create the history of a man and a company that revolutionized manufacturing, and America.

When Henry Ford began making the Model T, it was considered a marvel that his workers could turn out a car every 12 hours. But after visiting a meat-packing plant, where men stood while meat moved past them on hooks hanging from conveyer belts, Ford realized he could do better. By bringing the assembly line to the manufacturing process, he was able to make a car in 93 minutes.

Distressed that the line sometimes slowed as his factory awaited parts, Ford decided to make everything needed to construct a car, including steel, glass and paint. More than 100 raw materials from around the world were shipped into one end of the Ford Rouge plant. Completed cars moved out the other end.

The movie doesn't gloss over Ford's bitter opposition to unions and even shows his hired goons beating up union organizers. But what comes through strongest is Ford's genius and his impact on a new century.

The new plant is, oddly enough, a state-of-the-art experiment in industrial environmentalism. The factory grounds are planted with more than 100,000 flowers, trees and shrubs, and vines will eventually cover the factory walls. The roof, also covered with plants, is listed in the "Guinness Book of World Records" as the largest living roof. Cisterns capture rainwater for use in the factory; in the shop, hydrogen from paint fumes is captured and made into electricity.

From a deck above the factory floor, you watch workers and robots do their jobs. Miles of conveyor belts that look like roller coasters shoot up and down the interior. As they have since the 1920s, parts move to the workers. But now the parts move not just horizontally down the line, but up and down, so workers don't need to bend.

Greenfield Village

It takes most of another day to explore Greenfield Village, which holds 83 historic buildings.

Buildings moved from original locations include the Springfield, Ill., courthouse where Abraham Lincoln practiced law, and the Ohio home and bicycle shop where the Wright brothers tinkered with the idea of human flight.

It's clear during a walk through the village that Ford admired Edison, who routinely came pretty close to his goal of creating one major invention every six months, and a minor one every 10 days. Edison's lab in Fort Myers, Fla., was moved here, as was his glassmaking shed, his home and the 1870 boarding house where his assistants lived when working at his lab in Menlo Park, N.J.

Unable to buy Edison's Menlo Park lab, office, library and machine shop, Ford in the early 1900s arranged to have exact replicas built on the Greenfield Village grounds.

As part of the recent renovation, buildings within the village were moved to create seven themed areas.