history of detroit for young people

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Happy Birthday, Gabriel Richard

October 15, 2010 in History, Uncategorized | 2 comments

gabriel richard

Gabriel Richard was born on October 15, 1767 in La Ville des Saintes, France. Thirty-one years later, Father Richard — who had emigrated to Baltimore in 1792, then came to the Northwest Territory as a missionary — found himself in the city on the straits.

“Seventeen hundred and ninety-eight was really a red letter year,” writes Harriet Marsh in A History of Detroit for Young People, “because it brought to Detroit a wonderful man, Father Gabriel Richard, who came to take charge of the parish at Ste. Anne.”

Father Richard may be one of Detroit’s all-time most adored citizens. (I have read that Detroiters threw a huge birthday party for him as late as the 1930s.) Detroit was still a backwater frontier town when Richard arrived. When he died — a victim of the cholera epidemic of 1832 — he had founded Detroit’s first schools and its first printed newspaper; he’d shipped in its first printing press and hauled in its first organ on horseback. At the first public meeting of the Northwest territorial council in 1824, Father Richard opened the session with a prayer that “the legislators may make laws for the people, and not for themselves.”

Detroit’s founding Father cut a funny figure in town: be-robed and be-spectacled with a thick French accent, a sword scar on his face, a mighty intellect and a gentle demeanor. During the Great Fire of 1805, Richard recruited a heroic relief effort:

As usual, Father Gabriel Richard came to the rescue. He walked down the road to some of the farmhouses and soon had a group of French farmers in their canoes and bateaux going along the shore and asking for food for the fire sufferers. As soon as the canoes returned, a meal was cooked, and some of the men rigged up temporary shelters, using the fallen posts of the stockade. (Marsh, A History of Detroit for Young People)

And then, of course, Father Richard penned the fire-inspired motto that still lifts the hearts of long-suffering Detroiters: Speramus meliora; resurget cinerbus. We hope for better things; It shall rise from the ashes.

Legend even has it that when Father Richard was captured during the War of 1812, Tecumseh — the tribal confederacy leader who was fighting against America with the British — ordered his forces to stop cooperating until Richard’s release was secured.

Attendance at Father Richard’s funeral exceeded the population of Detroit. General Friend Palmer was in attendance. In his memoirs he wrote:

It was said that Father Richard was so studious and patient in his search after knowledge that he actually counted the eggs in a whitefish. How many millions, history fails to tell.

It is probably OK that the mystery of the whitefish eggs is lost to history. Father Gabriel Richard’s legacy is singular nonetheless.

Father Richard is entombed in Ste. Anne’s. We wish him a happy 243rd.

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Biking Detroit: A brief history

June 22, 2010 in History | No comments

Wouldn’t it be terrific to know how this book …

… ended up at Powell’s Books in Portland, OR? Quite a journey for a children’s book self-published in 1935.

However it fulfilled its own Manifest Destiny, it’s back where it belongs now, thanks to a very nice man in my life who was out of town on a business trip for several days and returned home with this book (!!!) as a souvenir.

You know how I feel about this book, right? Of course you do.

***

Tonight I set out for a bike ride at dusk (maybe inspired by reports from the USSF group ride this afternoon).

(Bike aside: I ride a vintage Ernie Clements Falcon that I bought for $10 at a Goodwill in Beloit, Wisconsin.  This bike was built under a bad sign. Days after I bought it, after a long ride through mint fields, my front wheel collapsed, hurling me to the street. I had it shopped at least four times after that until finally, in Milwaukee, I brought it to a friend who ran a punk bike collective for a total rebuild. He was evicted from his warehouse a week later and my bicycle, in pieces, mouldered in his boarded-up work room. He broke in to save it and then left on a six-month train-hopping vision quest across the country. I finally retrieved it from him, still in pieces, days before I moved back to Michigan, where I shipped it off to another secret bike laboratory so it could at least meet the glory it so badly deserved. It’s been fully restored and I’ve never ridden a better bike. It’s amazing that I haven’t given up on this bike. I actually don’t even know why I was so bent — and so lavish with cash — on saving it.)

Didn’t make it more than two miles before my back wheel made a hideous kerchunk. Everything stopped. The wheel had buckled. All that was left for me was to wait in the 7-11 parking lot for my ride to come get me, then get home and nose around for something to blog about.

***

[Source]

This is Norman Conger. He was with the National Weather Service. Here he is in 1880 on top of his High Ordinary.

Writes Florence Marsh:

During the [18] seventies the bicycle was a low-built contraption with the pedals on the front wheel and was sometimes called a “Bone-shaker.” This was followed in the eighties by the “Ordinary,” with one high wheel and one small one in the rear. A short stepladder or horse block was used for mounting, and the driver was above the heads of foot passengers and rode at great peril. With the improved wheel, the number of cyclists increased rapidly. Gay parties were now seen on [Belle Isle] where wheels could be rented.

Marsh is quick to clarify that the bicycle craze in Detroit didn’t really blow up until the 1890s, lest you think that “the old-time feeling for fast horses and racing on the ice had gone.” Oh, no.

Bikes in Detroit were a big deal, as I’m sure many readers know far better and more thoroughly than I do. The bicycle’s popularity in Detroit, as I’ve gathered from a few reliable accounts, contributed directly to the development of the car. Henry Ford’s first functional automobile, the Quadricycle, was basically a bicycle with four wheels and an engine. The Dodge brothers started in bicycles. William Metzger, who opened one of the first automobile dealerships in the country, was a bicycle enthusiast and entrepreneur first. His bicycle shop, Huber & Metzger, opened in 1891. Metzger was also a founding member of the Detroit Wheelmen, a prominent cycling club that P.N. Jacobsen wrote about in Outing that same year:

Wheeling has attaineda height of popularity in Detroit heretofore unknown.The vilest of cedar block pavement in the last stages of decay on the principal streets until recently retarded that natural growth in wheeling interest that almost all American cities experienced during the last few years.
… Although this general improvement in the city pavement has been a great factor in the wonderful increase in cycling, there is another which has been equally potent in this respect, and that is the existence of a large and active wheel club.
A year has scarcely passed since this club, active in cycling as well as socially, was formed, yet it is now in a position to properly entertain visiting wheelmen, and when visiting other cities to have a representation creditable to a city of such importance as Detroit. The formation of the club resulted in a concentration of all cycling interests in the city into one large vigorous organization under the name of the “Detroit Wheelmen.”

The Club, Jacobsen wrote, was one of the largest the nationwide League, and its membership was growing rapidly. That year the Wheelmen organized a 300-mile ride to Niagara Falls.

The frenzy for cycling in Detroit reached fever-grade in the last decade of the 19th century. Again from History of Detroit for Young People:

The city streets were crowded with men, women, and children on wheels … High school boys prided themselves on century runs to Port Huron and back on the Saturday holidays. As you may imagine pedaling a hundred miles gave a boy a strenuous day. Cass Avenue was so crowded with wheels after dark that the street twinkled with the tiny headlights and the air was filled with the clanging of bicycle bells. Foot passengers waited in vain for a chance to cross the road.

(I know this is a coincidence, but this was during the Pingree years. Golden. Age.)

Bike fever coincided with vast improvement to the city’s streets, which were being paved and mended like never before. The Detroit News writes that many historians “attribute the automobile’s explosive growth in Detroit to the network of superior roads built for bicyclists.”

A century (and change) later, the bike is a big deal in Detroit all over again. David Byrne loves to bike here. The Metro Times loves to bike here. The Hub, the Wheelhouse, Tour de Hood and Charlie love to bike here. I like to bike here too.

Part of me wonders if this is just dumb luck: the automobile — which the bike, in some way, made way for — widened, flattened, smoothed over, and made necessary, Detroit’s thousands of spidery thoroughfares. Now we don’t need so many of them and we can safely bike our hearts out.

But don’t you want to believe that it was bikes that made those roads possible in the first place? And now we’re just taking back what’s rightfully ours?

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Historic Elmwood Cemetery & Environs

January 14, 2010 in History | 3 comments

Yet another tip off from History of Detroit for Young People, which included a stop in their self-guided tours at Mt. Elliott Cemetery to visit with the venerable Colonel Jean Francois Hamtramck. Colonel Hamtramck, who served as Lieutenant Colonel under Mad Anthony Wayne in the fight for the Northwest Territory, established and became the first commandant of Fort Wayne Detroit and officially settled the city of Detroit for America at Fort Lernoult on July 11, 1796 (instead of Mad Anthony, who was struck, fatally, with gout).

(EDIT! 11-8-2010: Remember how History of Detroit for Young People was written in the 1930s? Yeah, well. Colonel Hamtramck was moved from Mt. Elliott to Veterans Memorial Park in Hamtramck — in the 1960s.)

(EDIT! 6-11-2011: Mad Anthony Wayne was not struck fatally with gout until later that year, but he didn’t make it to Detroit until August.)

Mt. Elliott is conveniently located right next to Elmwood Cemetery, a huge, rolling park set along a wooded valley, the final resting place of city founders, mayors, distillers, businessmen and activists. It’s tucked behind a busy, noisy corridor at McDougal and Lafayette, just a few blocks north of humming Jefferson Avenue, and when I visited yesterday, the neighborhood was clogged with packs of kids, parent-chauffeurs and pokey yellow school buses.

jacob farrand

Past the limestone gatehouse, though, it’s another story — and another world. I’m pretty sure I was the only (living) person there. When the private security guard pulled the car up next to me and rolled down the window, I thought he was going to tell me to move my car, leave the cemetery because it was closing, stop traipsing through the snowy plots, or otherwise get lost.

But I think he was just glad to see someone.

“Did you find what you’re looking for?” he asked.

“I’m just taking a little walk!” I said.

“Good,” he said. “It’s a beautiful place. Very historical.”

Then he kindly suggested I come again soon, and drove off.

The snow makes everything idyllic and restful, but it also makes it really hard for a lady like me, who is somehow not enough of an adult to go buy winter boots, to do a lot of productive exploring. But even the view from street level at Elmwood is tremendous — the place is a treasure field of towering obelisks, leaning spires, weeping angels and extravagant Victorian stonework.

veiled lady

This haunting veiled lady, her face obscured forever, has an amazing story, from the Elmwood Cemetery website:

Designed and sculpted by Randolph Rogers, this graceful and lovely monument on the Waterman lot has a long and interesting history. Carved of Carrera marble in Italy, it was shipwrecked off the Spanish Coast on its journey to Detroit in 1869. It was salvaged two years later, only to sink in the Hudson River and be recovered. The monument was later toppled over by a windstorm in 1919.

And even though I missed some of the biggest names in Detroit history — Lewis Cass, Coleman Young, Hiram Walker, Russell Alger — just a stroll along the perimeter of the cemetery is an astonishing reminder that most of our city streets and sites are named after, you know, real people:

williams and larned

Like Charles Larned, former Attorney General of the Michigan Territory and War of 1812 Veteran, and Civil War General Alpheus S. Williams, who is the subject of an equestrian memorial statue on Belle Isle;

canfield

The Canfield family;

samuel zug

Samuel Zug, furniture magnate, once owner and later abandoner of Zug Island;

theo h. eaton

Theo H. Eaton, business man and co-organizer of the Detroit Gas Light Company, now DTE, who used to look like this:

theo h eaton

chicago, elmwood 017

Abolitionist Shubael Conant;

fords

And an assortment of Fords. But not the famous ones.

By the time I got to Mt. Elliott, which is much smaller than Elmwood, my feet were too achey from the cold to walk. So I made a few slow laps in my car, my eyes darting across all of the headstones to find the lucky Colonel.

But no such luck for me. I’ll either have to go back when it thaws, or when I invest in some boots. Maybe I can claim them as some sort of blog-necessitated tax write-off.

Rest assured, though, lonely private security guard: I’ll come back soon.

elmwood statue

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Detroit History Tour, Part II: Grand Circus Park

December 17, 2009 in History | 7 comments

On our last Detroit history tour — following an itinerary from the 1933 schoolbook History of Detroit for Young People — your heroes visited Campus Martius Park, Cadillac Square and points west of Woodward that we just sort of aimlessly happened upon.

Yesterday, aimlessly driving up and down Woodward looking for something to do (before stopping in at City Bird to do some Christmas shopping), I realized I had never actually taken a walk across Grand Circus Park, which was looking especially lovely in the frigid late winter sunset. So I parked. And I walked. And I followed along in HD4YP, probably looking like a total jerk.

GRAND CIRCUS PARK

1. East side of Woodward Avenue:

a. Statue of Honorable William C. Maybury

william c. maybury

I love that Grand Circus Park is gated by two former Detroit mayors, political rivals and polar personalities, seated in giant chairs. The Maybury monument was unveiled in 1912 and depicts a temperance-minded mayor who “despised demon rum and once banned a performance by English showgirl Lily Langtry as too salacious for Detroit audiences” (source). He also oversaw the building of the bridge from the city of Detroit to Belle Isle and “successfully” (?) celebrated the 200th anniversary of the Chevalier de Cadillac’s founding of the city of Detroit. The French made Maybury a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, as if to say, “Hey! You don’t work for us anymore, but don’t be sad; you can be a Chevalier, too!”

Here, Maybury is pictured in front of the extravagantly Gothic Central United Methodist church, built in 1867. Adams Street in general looks a lot like old Europe, especially from this view (if you cover your right eye to obscure the view of Comerica Park):

b. Fountain dedicated to General Russell A. Alger

gcp_alger fountain

Everybody loved Russel Alger in Russell Alger’s day, but the real historical sticking point of this fountain is that it was done by Daniel Chester French, the famous sculptor best known for the seated figure of Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial. The fountain is his only work in the state.

c. Site of early Detroit tollgate. Find tablet near Adams avenue and read inscription.

I didn’t find this. I don’t think it’s there anymore, although frankly, it was really damn cold outside, so I guess I could’ve missed it. Does anybody know if this is still around?

2. West side of Woodward Avenue:

a. Statue of Governor Hazen Pingree

pingree

THIS GUY! Hazen Pingree! Someone told me that Hazen Pingree is enjoying a “cult revival” right now, which seems evidenced in part by this piece of greatness pasted on the base of the statue:

reelect pingree

And why not? Pingree improved streetcar transit and reduced streetcar fares, nailed tax evaders, rooted out corruption in city contracts and on the school board, used vacant city land to grow food for the city’s hungry, endorsed the eight-hour workday, built new schools and expanded public welfare programs in his four remarkable terms.

Plus, this guy — THIS GUY! — a former Union soldier and a cobbler, was a character. When he threw a party to inaugurate the 20th century, Teddy Roosevelt showed up in Rough Riders. He once arrested the entire Detroit Board of Education. He died on an African safari.

Even the colorful Fred Warner — that cheese-making, bicycle champion son of a gun, and a Hazen supporter — didn’t hold the Michigan governorship with quite so much flair.

b. Look at the electric fountain, erected in honor of Edison’s Golden Jubilee.

Boy, this was a missed opportunity. Why isn’t this fountain — commemorating the 50th anniversary of Edison’s invention of the lightbulb — made out of thousands of FLASHING ELECTRIC LIGHTBULBS?

Still, I think the stone birds eternally hanging out underneath the bowl of the fountain are a nice touch.

edison fountain

Here’s a charming 1929 article in Time describing the six-month-long nationwide party on the occasion of the lightbulb’s 50th anniversary. Edison himself was still alive, 82 years old and working hard to invent rubber that didn’t come from rubber trees before he died.

c. Bust of Christopher Columbus, facing the Grand Circus, erected on Washington Boulevard by citizens of Italian birth.

The Columbus bust is now at Jefferson and Randolph, appropriately gazing at the water.

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Detroit history, lost and found: Oliver Hazard Perry, Chevalier de Cadillac and City Hall relics

November 23, 2009 in History | 3 comments

perrys victory

Our Detroit history tour earlier this month left us with some unanswered questions about the fate of several artifacts from old City Hall, which was razed in 1961. We found some! Including a few we weren’t looking for.

Let’s check in, shall we?

I. THE CAMPUS MARTIUS

a. Find cannon from [Oliver Hazard] Perry’s victory.

These have moved to Belle Isle, standing guard in front of the Dossin Great Lakes Museum. These aren’t at all hidden, and it’s pretty common knowledge that they’re out there, but it took me stumbling on their latitude and longitude in the Historical Marker Database while I was looking for something else for the light switch to flip.

two cannons

(Also on Belle Isle: the camera batteries died, which happens a lot. Forgive the phone photography.)

Whilst waiting for some Oliver Hazard Perry admirers to conclude their photo op at the cannons,  we took a walk around the park and stopped to wonder at the tremendous limestone bell tower dedicated to Detroit News columnist Nancy Brown. Surrounded by a moat and a flock of evergreens, a few of which are fallen, behind a flaking iron gate, the structure is stately but gently blighted. I think the bells still ring, though.

nancy brown carillon

Nancy Brown was a beloved advice columnist who once inspired some 35,000 people to visit the Detroit Institute of Arts at the same time — maybe history’s first flash mob, an event the News called “Detroit’s greatest party.” Her bell tower, funded by her fervent readers, was christened in June, 1940. From a 6/24/40 Time article:

… Since 1934, at sunrise on Easter morning, Nancy Brown has sponsored a sunrise service on Belle Isle. Her readers, who flocked to the services in tens of thousands, heard preachers and speakers, but never were allowed a glimpse of her. With the fur collar of her coat turned up around her face, she mingled unnoticed among her admirers, for they had never even seen her picture.

Last week the Peace Carillon was unveiled at a sunrise dedication service on Belle Isle, and with it Nancy Brown was unveiled to her readers. Long before midnight, her audience began to gather in the grassy plaza around the limestone tower. Detroit police estimated that 100,000 people turned out to wait for Nancy.

At 4:45 a.m., as the sun rose over dewy treetops, the chimes pealed out Nearer, My God, to Thee … [and] diminutive Nancy Brown stepped to the lectern, peeped over and in a tremulous voice spoke to her readers for the first time.

c. Council chamber. Look at picture presented to Detroit by French Government, “Louis XIV delivering to Chevalier de Cadillac the ordinance and grant for the foundation of the City of Detroit.”

louis xiv and cadillac

We initially thought this painting, by Fernand LeQuesne, 1902, might be in the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts, but they told us “No dice!” and recommended we check in with the Detroit Historical Society. Curator Joel Stone says it’s in the collection for sure, but its whereabouts within the museum are still in question — Mr. Stone thinks the painting may be in storage, but his database is behaving curiously, and word on its current location is pending.

A friend recently told me about some “women statues” in a back lot at Fort Wayne, which after trying to track down the LeQuesne painting I found out were pieces of the old City Hall — statues of Art, Commerce, Industry and Justice, plus the building’s cornerstore, cornices, archway pieces and other slabs of sandstone are apparently stacked out in the woods behind the Fort.

Fort Wayne is also home to the building’s clock face and clock tower bell. I learned more at Buildings of Detroit and detroitblog, and you can too! A field trip is, obviously, in the works.

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Detroit History Tour: Campus Martius and Cadillac Square

November 12, 2009 in Local History, metro Detroit | 6 comments

history of detroit

Construction continues on the new site, which should be up and running by the end of the week, although your friends aboard the Night Train aren’t making any promises.

One of the luxuries of writing about history, though, is that isn’t subject to the hyper-fast timeline that directs our daily lives. Taking a few days off the blog grind to learn code and play with my stylesheets puts a dent in my traffic stats, but I’m not worried about missing something on Twitter that won’t be relevant by the end of the day.

That isn’t to say that history doesn’t change. We revise it all the time; we change the stories we tell, how we tell them, the way the think about the characters involved. We build new monuments and memorials and tear down old ones. We fight about it. In Detroit, these fights are fever-pitch: the abandoned structures and empty lots that crowd the city are both monuments to a better past (one many Detroiters can personally remember) and painful memento mori of decline.

But there’s older, thicker history in the city that most of us forget after grade school. I like this mustier, more legendary stuff: the fur trade, the settlements, the berobed Jesuits and oak plank roads and war generals. I find it comforting. The past is tenacious, and we are strung to it.

So, scholarly asides aside: it was thus that we approached the tour itinerary provided in the 1933 edition of History of Detroit for Young People by Harriet and Florence Marsh. The original itinerary is bolded with our comments and photos below. Remember, watch for street car crossings and always have an older person with you.

I. THE CAMPUS MARTIUS

a. Find cannon from [Oliver Hazard] Perry’s victory.

No luck here. Does anyone know where this is? The Detroit Historical Society or the Dossin Great Lakes Museum, maybe? We saw some cannons on Washington Blvd., but they belonged to General Macomb, as it turned out.

b. Statues of Cadillac, N.E.corner; Father Marquette, N.W. corner; Father Richard, S.E. corner; La Salle, S.W. corner.

gabriel richard

These are now on the campus of Wayne State University, in a park on Anthony Wayne Street. Father Richard’s aspect is especially haunting, and the Marshes speak lovingly of him, although they do mention that he was a plain, bespectacled man with a scar on his face from a sword wound. Not evident on the statue.

c. Council chamber. Look at picture presented to Detroit by French Government, “Louis XIV delivering to Chevalier de Cadillac the ordinance and grant for the foundation of the City of Detroit.”

Detroit City Hall was razed in 1961. I found this painting during a routine Google Book search, where it appeared on the cover of “Historical Collections” published by the Michigan Historical Society. The painting is credited as part of the “Art Musem of Detroit, 1902″ — is it in the DIA now?

2. The Soldiers and Sailors Monument faces the City Hall on the east side of Woodward Avenue. This was designed by Randolph Rogers and unveiled in 1872.

soldiers and sailors fwd

Standing triumphant.

3. Old Andrew’s Hotel, facing the Campus Martius, stood on the site of what now is the Schubert Detroit Opera House.

My dad speaks with a glint in his eye of Detroit’s movie house days, and he remembers the Schubert adoringly. The Schubert was demolished in 1964.

4. The fountain erected to the memory of Governor John J. Bagley stands on the north end of the campus.

bagley

This odd, pyramidal marble structure still stands, although it’s pretty dry as fountains go. It’s got lions in the center. Rawr.

II. CADILLAC SQUARE

1. Detroit Historical Musem is on the 23rd floor of Barlum Tower, rooms 2302-18.

Not anymore!

2. The Wayne County Building is on the east side of the square.

ren cen wayne county

The Wayne County Building may be the finest standing example of Roman Baroque architecture in North America,  says Wikipedia (I have to trust the crowds on this one as I know nothing about architecture and the claim is unsourced), and it’s one of my favorite buildings in the city. We tried to get in to nose around, but the security guard, though evidently delighted to see another human being in the building, regrettably informed us that it was closed, and advised us to call his boss, who has “a big heart for people like you.” (Tourists? History dorks? White kids running around downtown with cameras?)

Mad Anthony has rapidly become an obsession and my boyfriend has obligingly been ordering out-of-print biographies of him through interlibrary loan. The Erie, PA-based Erie Brewing Company makes a delicious American Pale Ale in Mad Anthony’s name and we recommend it.

3. Cadillac Chair of Justice

Buildings of Detroit eloquently describes the fate of the Chair of Justice: “By the late 1930s, the limestone had started to fall apart, and the chair had turned into a favorite resting spot for vagrants and drunks. On Nov. 1, 1941, workers showed up with sledgehammers and it was removed in pieces.”

VI. Points West of Woodward Ave.

We skipped around on this tour, mapless, downtown and on foot as we were.

a. Statue of General Alexander Macomb, born in Detroit and at one time Commander-in-Chief of the Army. It stands on Washington Boulevard at Michigan Avenue, opposite the Book-Cadillac.

Impressive! The glorious Macomb still stands handsomely on Washington Boulevard opposite the still-standing (and gloriously restored and open for business!) Book-Cadillac Hotel. Fun fact: Macomb’s statue is made out of melted down cannons.

general macomb

Also on Washington Boulevard is a statue of Casimir Pulaski.

casimir pulaski

b. Mariner’s Church, northwest corner of Woodward Avenue and Woodbridge Street.

mariners church

Old Mariner’s moved to Woodward and Jefferson in 1955.

h. Fort Shelby, originally Fort Lernoult, was located on what is now W. Fort Street from Griswold to Wayne streets. The Post Office is on this site.

fort lernoult

Not a Post Office anymore.

More to  come!

(UPDATE: We found a few of the missing things referenced in this post.)

By the late 1930s, the limestone had started to fall apart, and the chair had turned into a favorite resting spot for vagrants and drunks. On Nov. 1, 1941, workers showed up with sledgehammers and it was removed in pieces.

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Changes afoot

November 9, 2009 in Uncategorized | No comments

ship and dragon plaque fw

This weekend — with its unbelievable 60 degree weather, a healthy serving of historical adventuring and a rollicking season finale of Mad Men — was one of the best ever. The Hounds Below got down with their howly selves at the Majestic Cafe, we took in a month’s worth of accumulated recyclables, we witnessed the bowel-shaking power of the colossal pipe organ at Old Mariner’s Church and watched a 100-year-old retired sea captain ring one of the eight tolls of the bell to commemorate lives lost on the Great Lakes, and part one of our self-guided itinerary from History of Detroit for Young People (published in 1933) was a success.

I took lots of pictures and will share them soon, BUT: I must warn you that I am taking more decisive reigns at this blog and moving to a self-hosted server, which will give me more autonomy in the way the site looks and feels. BONUS: I am doing most of the technical work myself, and teaching myself how to do it, from building a custom header to exporting my existing database. So it may look a little wonky for a while.

I didn’t want to make this move until I had a solid sense of what I really thought I was doing, blogging here, but now that I’ve spent a month or so clearing up my voice and trusting my instincts and chasing what excites me, I think it’s become pretty clear. Thanks for slugging through the uncertainty.

This week: downtown and Campus Martius, then (from the treaty at Fort Lernoult to the razing of City Hall) and now (where is Oliver Hazard Perry’s cannon?); Farmington’s Pernambuco Hollow; more of the usual scratching around in old cemeteries.

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Will Detroit ever be this good again?

November 5, 2009 in Culture, Local History, metro Detroit | 1 comment

voyageurs

I love when people say Detroit is “a shadow of its former self,” or one of America’s “fallen cities.” The benchmark, of course, is Detroit at the height of its industrial success and the peak of its population in the 1950s. But I’ve been reading accounts of the city in the very earliest days of the fur trade and the French occupation, thinking to myself: will it ever be the same? I know what you’re thinking: grueling physical labor! the constant threat of Indian raids! no antibiotics OR contraceptives!

But I found this incredible book, History of Detroit for Young People, by Harriet and Florence Marsh, self-published in the early 1930s, and it makes the early settler days of southeastern Michigan sound pretty swell*:

I am forgetting the parties they had any time during the year that was convenient. The French, as a rule, have happy, cheerful dispositions. They work while they work, and play while they play. In spite of all the toil and hardship and real danger that these first settlers endured, both old and young were able to throw off care and anxiety and enjoy themselves whenever it was possible … [and] Every one, young and old, danced. … In those days, people really danced! Nobody sidled over the floor in our lazy fashion. These French people would never have wished to do so. If they had, they would not have dared, for their friends would have supposed they were ill, and ought to go home to bed.

Late in the 17th century, Cadillac wrote to the Comte de Frontenac that the chain of Great Lakes waters were “as richly set with islands as a queen’s necklace with jewels, and the beautifully verdant shores of the mainland served to complete the picture of a veritable paradise.” Of special interest to Cadillac was “the region that lies south of the pearl-like lake to which they gave the name of Ste. Clair, and the country bordering upon that deep, clear river, a quarter of a league broad, known as Le Detroit.”

After personally persuading Louis XIV to support a new post on the straits, Cadillac left France for Montreal and from there, on June 5, 1701, set sail with “one hundred Frenchmen and one hundred Algonquin.”

It was in the early summer, when we usually have beautiful weather. The twenty-five canoes were manned by stout voyageurs, who raced like mad over the water for two hours at a stretch, then stopped for a smoke and a rest. After this a new set of paddlers took the oars. The voyageurs had many jolly boating songs which they sang as they pulled the oars.

The Marshes include a few of these coureurs de bois folk songs in the appendix of the book, for kids at home to sing along (and for me to learn on my accordion?). They also tell charming stories that bring a playful vividness to life in the early settlement:

Cadillac brought three horses and ten head of oxen. Two of the horses died, but the fine one that was his saddle horse lived and must have been a great help to him in his journeys around the settlment … he named it Colon. Queer name for a horse, was it not? But horses get used to almost anything.

… If your father and mother had brought you to the settlement, who knows? Perhaps you might even have seen Cadillac some morning. If you had just arrived from France, even if you were a little boy, you would surely have been dressed in a little gown with long sleeves and a skirt that almost reached the floor. As you walked along, Cadillac might have come clattering by on Colon. And your mother, as she bowed to the Commandant, would have picked you up and squeezed herself into the nearest doorway. Ste. Anne Street was only twenty feet wide, and no one knows what a horse might do, especially if his name was Colon.

In an account of Detroit written for the King, Cadillac describes with most Baroque flourish the flora and fauna of the trading post, which has “never wept under the knife of the vine-dresser” or the “pitiless hand of the reaper.”

(from Detroit Perspectives: Crossroads and Turning Points, edited by Wilma Wood Hendrickson. Wayne State University Press, 1991):

Under these broad walks one sees assembled by hundreds the timid deer and faun, also the squirrel bounding in his eagerness to collect the apples and plums with which the earth is covered. Here the cautious turkey calls her numerous brood to gather the grapes, and here also their mates come to fill their large and gluttonous crops. Golden pheasants, the quail, the partridge, woodcock and numerous doves swarm in the woods and cover the country, which is dotted and broken with thickets and high forests of full-grown trees, forming a charming perspective, which sweetens the sad lonesomeness of the solitude. The hand of the pitiless reaper has never mown the luxurious grass upon which fatten woolly buffaloes, of magnificent size and proportion.

There are ten species of forest trees, among them are the walnut, white oak, red oak, the ash, the pine, white-wood and cotton-wood; straight as arrows, without knots, and almost without branches, except at the very top, and of prodigious size. Here the courageous eagle looks fiercely at the sun, with sufficient at his feet to satisfy his boldly armed claws. The fish are here nourished and bathed by living water of crystal clearness, and their great abundance renders them none the less delicious.

It sounds like a golden age to me.

(*There’ll be more gems from History of Detroit for Young People later this week, hopefully including a 2009 tour of one of the recommended itineraries in the appendix. A word of caution from the authors:  “These trips are outlined with the hope that you may be able to get your father to drive you to these places. Because of the congestion of traffic in so many of the downtown districts, especially where changes of street cars must be made, it would not be safe for you to go with more than five or six companions. There should always be an older person with you.”)

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