Cadillac’s 1701 fort named Detroit for the river strait
Detroit is Michigan’s largest city, facing Windsor, Ontario, across the Detroit River. In 1701 French officers planted Fort Pontchartrain on the strait linking Lakes St. Clair and Erie. The toponym is French détroit—“strait”—and later Motown and techno redefined the city’s soundtrack.
The Anishinaabe name for the area, Waawiiyaataanong, means where the water curves around, and Huron, Odawa, Potawatomi and Iroquois peoples lived here by the seventeenth century. On 24 July 1701 Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, his lieutenant Alphonse de Tonty and over a hundred French settlers began a fort on the river’s north bank, naming it for Louis XIV’s navy minister Pontchartrain; the parish of Sainte-Anne, founded two days later, is the second-oldest continuously operating Catholic parish in the United States. Cadillac dreamed of a Paris of New France.
British troops took the post in 1760 during the French and Indian War and shortened its name to Detroit. In 1763 Potawatomi, Ojibwe and Huron fighters besieged the fort during Pontiac’s War without taking it. Although the 1783 Treaty of Paris handed the region to the United States, British forces stayed until 1796, after the Jay Treaty. A fire in 1805 destroyed nearly every colonial building, and the city, first incorporated in 1806, was reincorporated in 1815, elected John R. Williams its first mayor in 1824 and served as Michigan’s first state capital from 1837.
Automobiles made it the nation’s fourth-largest city by 1920, and General Motors, Ford and Stellantis still have their headquarters in the metro area. The Detroit–Windsor crossing is North America’s second busiest after San Diego–Tijuana.
Population peaked at 1.85 million in 1950 and has since fallen by more than 65 percent, and in 2013 Detroit became the largest American city ever to file for bankruptcy. Nicknames record its moods: Motor City, Motown, Hockeytown, the Renaissance City, and The 313 after its area code.
Source: Detroit
