The History of City Centre

<!-- This section is a summary. Please make additions to the full History of ... article. Thank you. --> Paleo-Indians inhabited areas near Detroit as early as 11,000 years ago including the culture referred to as the Mound Builders. By the 17th century, the region was inhabited by Huron, Odawa, Potawatomi, and Iroquois peoples. The area is known by the Anishinaabe people as Waawiiyaataanong, translating to 'where the water curves around'. The first Europeans did not penetrate into the region and reach the straits of Detroit until French missionaries and traders worked their way around the Iroquois League, with whom they were at war in the 1630s. The Huron and Neutral people held the north side of Lake Erie until the 1650s, when the Iroquois pushed them and the Erie people away from the lake and its beaver-rich feeder streams in the Beaver Wars of 1649–1655. after Louis Phélypeaux, comte de Pontchartrain (1643–1727), the Secretary of State of the Navy under King Louis XIV (1638–1715). Sainte-Anne de Détroit was founded on July 26 and is the second-oldest continuously operating Roman Catholic parish in the United States. France offered free land to colonists to attract families further west into the Great Lakes region interior of the North American continent to Detroit; when it eventually reached a population of about 800 by 1765, after the colonial conflict of the French and Indian War (1753–1763), (Seven Years' War in Europe), it became the largest European settlement between the important towns of Montreal and New Orleans, both also French settlements, in the former colonies of New France and La Louisiane (further south on the Mississippi River, on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico), respectively. The region's then colonial economy was based on the lucrative fur trade, in which numerous Native American peoples had important roles as trappers and traders. During the French and Indian War (1753–63)—the North American front of the Seven Years' War in Europe between the Kingdom of Great Britain and the Kingdom of France—British troops gained control of the settlement a few years into the conflict in 1760 and shortened its name to Detroit. Several regional Native American tribes, such as the Potowatomi, Ojibwe and Huron, launched Pontiac's War (1763–1766), and laid siege in 1763 to Fort Detroit along the Detroit River in the Great Lakes but failed to capture it. In defeat, France ceded its territory in North America of New France and south of the lakes east of the Mississippi to the Appalachian Mountains to Britain following the war. When Great Britain evicted France from its colonial possessions in New France (Canada) in the peace terms of the Treaty of Paris of 1763, it also removed one barrier to American colonists migrating west across the mountains. British negotiations with the Iroquois would both prove critical and lead to the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which limited settlements South of and below the Great Lakes and west of the Alleghenies / Appalachians. Many colonists and pioneers in the Thirteen Colonies along the East Coast, resented and then simply defied this restraint, later becoming supporters of the rebellious American Revolution. By 1773, after the addition of increasing numbers of the Anglo-American settlers, the population of Detroit and Fort Detroit, was edging up to 1,400 (doubled in the previous decade). During the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783), the indigenous and loyalist raids of 1778 and the resultant 1779 decisive Sullivan Expedition reopened the Ohio Country (north of the Ohio River and west of the mountains) to even more westward emigration, which began almost immediately to get away from the eastern warfare. By 1778, its population had doubled again, reaching 2,144 and it was the third-largest town in what was known then as the Province of Quebec since the British takeover of former French colonial possessions in North America in 1763. After the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783) and the establishment and recognition of the United States as an independent country, the Great Britain ceded Detroit and other territories in the interior region of the continent, south of the Great Lakes and west of the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River under the peace of the terms of the 1783 Treaty of Paris. The new Northwest Territories established the southern border with Great Britain's remaining colonial provinces in British North America and became provinces of Upper Canada and Lower Canada. However, the disputed border area remained under British control with several military forts and trading posts for another decade, and its forces did not fully withdraw until 1796, following the negotiations and ratification of the subsequent Jay Treaty of 1794 between the British and Americans. By the turn of the 19th century, white American settlers began pouring westwards across the Appalachians and through the Great Lakes. Today the municipal flag of Detroit reflects both its French and English colonial heritage. Descendants of the earliest French and French-Canadian settlers formed a cohesive community, who gradually were superseded as the dominant population after more Anglo-American settlers arrived in the early 19th century with American westward migration. Living along the shores of Lake St. Clair and south to Monroe and downriver suburbs, the ethnic French Canadians of Detroit remain a subculture in the region up into the 21st century. After the Great Fire of 1805 destroyed nearly all of Detroit's colonial buildings, the town was quickly rebuilt with aid from both local residents and those from Quebec. The town of Detroit was first incorporated as a city in 1806, but the incorporation was repealed just three years later. It was reincorporated in 1815 following the War of 1812. In 1824, the city held its first mayoral election, with John R. Williams becoming the first elected mayor. Following Michigan's admission to the Union in 1837, Detroit served as the state's first capital and hosted the inaugural state elections that same year. Between 1815 and 1900, the city borders expanded significantly through the annexation of land from surrounding townships, such as Hamtramck, Springwells, Greenfield, and Grosse Pointe, before many of those townships incorporated as independent cities in the 20th century. Public land sales began in 1818, and by 1836, the city formalized its public water supply by establishing a municipal water works. It followed the end of the second cholera pandemic that had devastated Detroit and many other North American cities. The city's population grew steadily throughout the 19th century, fueled by immigrants from Germany, Poland, Italy, Greece, and Belgium. By the 1830s, Germans had become the city's predominant ethnic group. During the Irish Great Famine of the 1840s, a wave of Irish immigrants arrived, settling primarily in the Corktown neighborhood. Detroit's Black population remained small during the 19th century; it constituted less than four percent of the city's population by the time of the 1863 race riot during the Civil War, numbering roughly 1,500 to 1,600 residents. Detroit's unique geography provided easy access to raw materials like iron ore, copper, coal, and timber. Coupled with the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, this proximity shifted the city's local economy toward heavy industries such as machinery, metalworking, and engine production in the mid-19th century. Well before the automotive era, the city led the nation in the construction of railroad cars and freighters; the Michigan-Peninsular Car Company was the city's largest manufacturer during that period, while the Detroit Dry Dock Company built hulls for the largest ships on the Great Lakes. By the 1870s, cast-iron stoves manufacturing had become Detroit's largest single industry.

Source: Wikipedia