Building 11 was dismantled in 1940 and donated to the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan.

Edison National Historic Site, which preserves Thomas A. Edison’s last and largest laboratory, is once again the home of Building 11, a structure absent from the West Orange site for over sixty years.

Built about 1910, Building 11 differed from the red brick laboratory buildings surrounding it. The clapboard structure consists of an open-plan single floor and was adapted to a variety of uses by Edison and his experimenters who worked on numerous research projects at any one time. It is the only remaining example of a type of building that Edison and his "muckers" would build quickly to meet some need and might just as quickly remove.

Building 11 was dismantled in 1940 and donated to the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan. In recent years, however, the Museum made changes in its interpretive plans and Building 11 no longer fit the needs of that site. Museum officials expressed a desire to the National Park Service to return the building and its contents to Edison NHS.

Building 11 will serve as the home of the Site’s varied public programs. The Black Maria Film Festival, for example, is an international forum for student films and videos that has had its annual opening night at the Site for over a decade.

More than 10,000 school students visit the Site each year, and Building 11 will provide expanded space for interpretive programs that awaken them to Edison’s innovation process. In addition, public programs for adults, such as evening and weekend lectures on Edison’s inventions and scholarly conferences devoted to various topics in science and technology will be held there.

Finally, the building provides additional space for temporary exhibits that document those parts of Edison’s work not fully covered in the Site’s regular tours.