Postscript : Ford’s Dream Lies in Decay Along the Amazon : The car magnate’s effort to tame Brazil’s rain forest and create his own rubber farm was a bust. Fordlandia lives on, but has no purpose.

Heading up the Rio Tapajos from Santarem, where the river’s blue-black waters meet the muddy Amazon, a traveler encounters little but the jungle.

In the first 100 miles, the only things that disturb the dense forest are a handful of tiny hamlets and the occasional lone thatched hut. The only passable road is the Tapajos itself, and most of its traffic moves by canoe or slow-going, wooden steamer.

But around a bend at the point where the river begins to narrow, a water tower peeks its head out through the forest canopy and freshly mowed lawns rise up from the large, bank-side docks toward long, cupolaed warehouses, basketball courts, the veranda of a clapboard house and the heavy arches of a hilltop church.

Welcome to Fordlandia--a little piece of Michigan, circa 1940, in the middle of the Amazon rain forest.

Once one of the gems of the Brazilian jungle, it remains a testament to the energy and will of its founder and namesake, Henry Ford.

While the inventor of the Model T never set foot in the place, it was here that the Ford Motor Co. tried from 1927 to 1945 to realize his dreams of independence from Dutch and British rubber cartels in Asia.

Today--its rubber trees long gone and American-style houses falling into decay--Fordlandia stands also as a warning to those who dream of taming the Amazon.

In its heyday, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Fordlandia was the most developed community in the entire Amazon basin. The community was built in one section of the 2.5 million-acre rubber plantation and its 5,000 resident Brazilian workers enjoyed high wages, good housing and schools. Oceangoing ships stopped at its docks. It boasted one of the world’s largest sawmills. Its hospital was one of the finest in Brazil, and despite its location in the middle of the jungle, patients traveled from as far away as Sao Paulo, 1,600 miles to the southeast, to receive treatment from the town’s American doctors.

“It was a little strange,” says Dom Tiago (James) Ryan, 80, who served as Fordlandia’s Roman Catholic priest from 1943 to 1958. A Chicago-born Franciscan, he has been in the region for 50 years and served as bishop of Santarem, though he is now retired. “Ford shipped everything from Detroit, including fire hydrants and coffins, and created this little model American community. People came from all over Brazil to work for ‘Senhor Ford.’ ”

Ford had plans to turn this into a community of 50,000, but things didn’t pan out. Workers cleared 7,000 acres of native forest, exported the hardwoods and planted rubber trees from Asia. In the humid climate, however, the single-species plantation was an easy target for a local fungus, and many rubber trees died of blight.

By the mid-1930s, Fordlandia managed to ship out raw latex, the tree sap that forms the basis for rubber, but never as much as expected. And just as the Second World War loomed and Japanese imperial designs sent the price of Asian rubber supplies soaring, scientists discovered synthetic substitutes. And in 1942, swarms of caterpillars nearly devastated the entire plantation. Three years later, after having invested more than $10 million, Ford sold the town and its plantations to the Brazilian government for a mere $500,000.

The government also tried to make a go of rubber farming but quickly gave up. In the 1950s, the Brazilians tore out the rubber trees and tried raising water buffalo. That venture too proved unprofitable, and the government liquidated its ranching assets in 1990. The 4,300 residents who remain here live off federal and municipal government subsidies.

Fordlandia’s famous hospital now stands empty. It has had no doctor for six years, and the equipment--state of the art in the 1930s and 1940s--gathers dust and mildew beside cabinets of moldering medical journals from the same era. The only indication of contemporary medicine is a government poster tacked up in the foyer warning of Brazil’s current cholera epidemic.

In the town’s American compound, the sturdy houses and tree-shaded streets are falling into decay, although the original plumbing and General Electric ceiling fans still work. Ryan’s Romanesque church, built after Ford left, is the only well-maintained building. For now, the town is just hanging on, with no economic purpose. Gold prospecting further up the Tapajos, once a tempting opportunity for those who wanted out, has fallen off, and the unregulated “Wild West” prospecting has left the river contaminated with mercury.

“We really don’t have anything much to do,” said Altimiro Braz, the town’s government administrator, the other day. “Next week I think we’ll get up to the old American neighborhood, dust out the buildings and cut the grass. The Ministry of Agriculture has 40 employees here, and we haven’t had anything to do for three years, but we still get paid.”

Ryan, for one, contends that arrogance helped doom Ford’s Brazilian dream.

“The Americans never really figured out what country they were in,” he said. “The food, for instance, was great, but it was not what Brazilians were used to. In the heat of the jungle they fed them big American breakfasts complete with oatmeal. They didn’t think of beans and rice. The workers’ houses were hotter than the gates of hell because some faraway engineer decided that a metal roof was better than something more traditional like thatch.

“The Americans didn’t blow their noses without approval from Detroit. They didn’t even want to let me set up in town, saying they would have to let in all the other religions as well. That makes sense in the United States but not in a country where almost everybody is Catholic. I’m afraid these things caused a few minor revolts.”

But Leon Correa Bouillet, the mayor of the region that includes Fordlandia, has a different view.

“Brazilians are always talking about how foreigners exploit our resources,” he said, “but our government and people never do anything. Ford built us a hospital; he paid his workers well and gave them good houses. When Fordlandia had a train, the big city, Santarem, was still using oxcarts.”

To Correa, the solution to reviving the town and the area is obvious: “We need more Americans in the region. It would be nice if the company would come back.”