Hidden History of Detroit by Amy Elliott Bragg

Author:Amy Elliott Bragg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2012-12-10T16:00:00+00:00

Detroit in 1820 and the steamer Walk-in-the-Water, circa 1910. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Detroit Publishing Company Collection, reproduction no. LC-D4-22690.

Even before the Erie Canal, steamboat service on the Great Lakes doubled Detroit’s population. When the canal was completed in 1825, about two thousand people lived in the city. By 1836, that many people were arriving in Detroit every day. Not all of them were destined to stay; many were just passing through, by water or by land, to farther points. So Michigan needed roads. It needed a ton of them. And it needed them fast. They were the single biggest obstacle to growth and progress in the territory.

Governor Cass pushed for provisions to create a network of territorial roads, spoking out from Detroit northwest to Pontiac and Saginaw, northeast to Fort Gratiot, west to Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti and Chicago and south to Sandusky, Ohio. Clear some brush, cut the trees lining the route down to stumps, lay down a few logs and there you had it: a road into the wilderness. Still rough, to say the least. But once more, better than the alternative of no roads at all.

A traveler with Reverend George Taylor in 1837 recounted the following story:

One of these men, a little ahead of the rest of them, discovered, as he thought, a good beaver hat lying in the center of the road, and called his companions to a halt while he ventured to secure it. At the risk of his life, he waded out, more than knee deep to the spot, and seizing the hat, to his surprise he found a live man’s head under it, but on lustily raising a cry for help, the stranger in the mire declined all assistance, saying: “Just leave me alone, I have a good horse under me, and have just found bottom; go on, gentlemen, and mind your own business.” Such a story, of course, could but have a tendency to heighten in a stranger’s estimation, the wonderful attractions of the new State of Michigan.

In the 1840s, with many of the roads built during the first frenzy of internal improvements in the 1820s and ’30s falling into neglect, plank roads were proposed. That allowed private owners to charter and operate roads for a small toll. Although many were never completed and some decayed from lack of use, the plank road situation seemed to alleviate the burden of maintenance on the local government and improve ease of access to places like Ypsilanti, Farmington, Howell, Mt. Clemens and Pontiac for settlers who were, very early on, making homes in what we now call the suburbs.

MAINTENANCE

Within the city, it was a different story. When visitors, encouraged by the newly expedient route to the territory, arrived in Detroit, they found a city ill-equipped to deal with an influx of tourists and traffic. Harriet Noble wrote of her arrival in Detroit in 1824:

For a city it was certainly the most filthy, irregular place I had ever seen; the streets were filled with Indians and low French, and at that time I could not tell the difference between them.

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