Green Bay was founded by a Frenchman hunting a route to China
In 1634 Jean Nicolet paddled into a bay on Lake Michigan hoping he had found the people of the sea and a shortcut toward China. He had not, but the trading post he set up became Green Bay, now a paper-making city of about 107,000 best known for its football team.
Samuel de Champlain, founder of New France, sent Nicolet west to make peace with Native nations disrupting the fur trade and to look for a quicker route to Asia. The Ho-Chunk, who called themselves People of the Sea, lived here, as did the Menominee. Nicolet's post was first named La Baie des Puants, the Bay of Stinking Waters. A Jesuit mission followed in 1671 and a fort in 1717. The present name came from British fur traders, who called it Green Bay because the water and shore took on green tints in early spring; the French title gradually faded.
Charles Michel de Langlade, son of a French-Canadian father and an Odawa mother, moved in with his family from Quebec in 1765 and is regarded as the first permanent European settler in what became Wisconsin. Britain took control in 1761 and, keen to profit, handed out fur-trading licences freely, so the trade peaked under British rule. Once the War of 1812 was over, American troops raised Fort Howard beside the river to guard the northern frontier, and the Erie Canal, finished in 1825, brought waves of New England farmers.
Wisconsin's first newspaper, the Green Bay Intelligencer, started here in 1833, and the town became a city on 27 February 1854. Immigrants followed, above all from Belgium, and railways from the 1860s opened up the timber that made paper the leading employer. President Franklin D. Roosevelt visited in 1934 to mark the city's 300th anniversary.
The Green Bay Packers, founded in 1919 and in the NFL since 1921, remain the only small-town team left in any of America's four major professional leagues. At the 2020 census the city had 107,395 residents, the third largest in Wisconsin, and about 14% of it lies within the Oneida Nation reservation.
Source: Green Bay, Wisconsin
