INTRODUCTION
When I told my dad that I was writing a book about Detroit history, he asked, “What kind of history? Like the kind you read in books?”
Yeah, I said. Basically.
“So what’s the point? If it’s already in a book?” Then he asked if I was going to write about prohibition, which, as it turns out, is a common question people ask when they find out you’re writing a book about Detroit history. And I did write about prohibition. Just not the prohibition that people remember.
My dad didn’t realize it at the time, but he hit a nerve I have about writing history: by definition, hasn’t history already been written? And doesn’t that make me a hack?
I started writing about history because I didn’t know anything about it. I had just moved back to my hometown, Farmington Hills, from Milwaukee. I did it for a pretty good reason—my then boyfriend, now husband—but once I got here, I had some feelings to deal with—teenage feelings. What did it mean to live in the suburbs again? What was this freakish place I had come from, with its acres of weedy parking lots, fake-looking front lawns, brigades of high-shine SUVs and miles of strip malls stretching into the sunset? And where had Farmington Hills come from? And how did it fit into the sprawling galaxy of cities, townships and villages that enveloped its hard-as-a-marble core of Detroit?
Before I started writing about Detroit history, I thought Detroit history went like this: French fur traders founded it, something something something, there was a fire at some point, then Henry Ford started making cars and then Detroit got really big! Something about prohibition and the Purple Gang, and then the riots in the ’60s, when white people left town and made the suburbs. And now today, it’s getting better, sort of, but there are still a lot of empty buildings. And a lot of suburbs.
It’s not that everything I knew about Detroit history was wrong. But it was certainly incomplete and hasty. Detroit sometimes forgets that there was ever a time before the automobile, or that it’s one of the oldest and most perpetually influential cities in the Midwest: battle ground of the War of 1812, capital city of the Michigan Territory, last stop on the Underground Railroad and then, variously, Stove City, Dry Dock City, Cigar City, Salt City and Pharma City decades before the Motor City had motors to move it.
The suburbs, too, existed and prospered long before the combustion engine. Farmington was established by Quakers in 1824. Nathan Power, Farmington’s founding father, is buried in its tiny Quaker Cemetery next to his first wife and five-year-old daughter, who both died during the cholera outbreak of 1832.
History gave me a way into Farmington and, ultimately, Detroit. I traipsed through cemeteries to meet the people I was reading about, visited the landmarks they left behind and blogged about everything I turned up. Some of my reports from the field were obvious. Others were obscure. I gravitated toward mysteries, rumors, legends, ghost stories, funny stories and stories about people drinking. Did you know that when Mad Anthony Wayne (victor of the Battle of Fallen Timbers and namesake of Wayne County) was exhumed from his grave in Erie, Pennsylvania, his bones were boiled in a big cauldron, stuffed into two saddlebags and then taken overland to his family’s cemetery in Radnor? People say that his ghost wanders U.S. 322 looking for the bones that fell out of the packs. Have you heard the one about the 1817 Conant & Mack Company expedition to Pontiac, where Lewis Cass, Solomon Sibley, David McKinstry and Alexander Macomb snuck into a gristmill and had an impromptu flour-grinding competition? Some say that they gave the winner the first mayorship of Detroit. Then they fake-arrested a homesteader for not drinking with them and fake-sentenced him to death. He fainted. When he revived, they plied him with apologies and gifts, and he said that he would go through it all over again.
Depending on whom you ask, I became terrific fun at parties or a total bore at parties. And through it all, there were the books—always the books (and library monographs and digital archives). And with the books was the creeping fear that I was just regurgitating what people had already written about—you know, in books.
But as I started working on my own book, I started thinking about the history of those history books, especially the two I loved the most, History of Detroit and Michigan and Early Days in Detroit, published in 1884 and 1906, respectively. Who had written them and why? And how did they look at the world? Were they informed by what the authors remembered of the city or what they saw coming for the city in the future? What moved them? Where did they see themselves in the portraits they drew of Detroit?
At John King, a majestic used bookstore in an old glove factory just off the Lodge Freeway, I found a copy of City of Destiny, written by George Washington Stark in 1943, during the Arsenal of Democracy years. The book—signed by the author, it turned out—was stuffed with newspaper clippings about Stark, a columnist for the Detroit Free Press and a self-described “old-timer.”
Stark was born in 1884, and he remembered pre-automotive Detroit, a muddy place full of spooked horses and barn fires but also peace, quiet, gentility and tree-lined avenues. He wrote City of Destiny, a treasure box of city history told fast and loose from Cadillac to press date, as a project in context. How did Detroit’s destiny lead from the rough river shores of Fort Pontchartrain in 1701 to the nerve center of World War II and one of the biggest cities in America? He wrote:
Since Cadillac came, the community, as outpost, village, town and city, has experienced both travail and triumph, each in heaping measure. It has endured fire and famine and pestilence and somehow survived them all. It has withstood rioting and the shock of savage assault and it has recovered from the humiliation of a craven military surrender. It has been rocked by political scandal and intrigue, but in every instance, it has quickly recovered its prestige.
These defeats and frustrations have been more than balanced by the triumphs. Or, if you prefer, THE TRIUMPH, for its present eminence is the result of no recent industrial development. Rather, it is the sequence of a long progression of men and events.
History writers sought similar context as the curtains closed on the nineteenth century and Detroit approached its 1901 bicentennial. The pioneers who had come to the city with the advent of the steamboat in the 1820s were beginning to die off. The fortunes of Detroit were no longer tied to farming, fishing or the fur trade but instead relied on large-scale manufacturing and heavy industry. The streets were electrically lit at night; crowded with bicycles, pedestrians, buggies with motors on them and horse and coaches; and crisscrossed with streetcars both electrified and horse-drawn. Houses that had been built by French families a century earlier were torn down. Houses that had been built by captains of industry thirty or forty years prior were torn down, too. General Friend Palmer collected his reminiscences of the days of steamboat captain-kings and the old stalwarts who hung out on the patio of Sheldon & Rood bookstore and gossiped all summer about Indian concomitance and Indian raids. Silas Farmer started his encyclopedia of early Detroit. And as the 200th anniversary of Detroit’s founding approached, historical committees sprang to action, and Detroiters became enraptured with the story of their knightly founder, the Sieur de Cadillac, his hardy voyageurs and his glamorous frontier wife. Reenactments, pageants, parades and memorials were inescapable.
It’s 2011, and I think I missed the latest “where we’ve been/where we’re going” check-in by ten years. When we celebrated the tricentennial in 2001, I was a junior in high school and not at all aware that Detroit was celebrating a tricentennial.
But now is a good time (is there ever a bad time?) to take up the voyage again. When Detroiters talk about history today, it’s often to make sense of Detroit’s “big mess”: a dwindling population, high unemployment, a hollowed-out economy, acres of empty property and an infrastructure desperately in need of repair. How did this happen after we spent half of the twentieth century on top of the world?
Detroit’s history can do so much more than that, though. There’s a lot of joy in these old halls (I giggle a lot when I work on this stuff) and plenty to celebrate. There are role models and stories of mortal hubris—like the hot spur and boy wonder Stevens T. Mason, who went toe to toe with the State of Ohio and President Andrew Jackson to deliver Michigan to statehood and whose ambition created a statewide network of roads, railways and canals, effecting a gaping hole in the new state’s economy. And there’s a reason Re-Elect Pingree posters pop up all over town during election years.
“Detroit is opulent and generous,” wrote George Washington Stark in his introduction to City of Destiny. I believe that to be true. To that I would add tenacious. I think the best lesson of Detroit history, end to end, is that this dynamic city, against all odds, will persevere. It will change, perhaps even drastically. But it will rise.
So yes, this is a history book, full of the kind of history you read about in history books. But I have strived to bring Detroit history to life a little—to introduce you to people I love, to make you laugh and to illuminate a city that you may not have realized was ever here.
I hope it gives you, as it has given me, a way home.