Once upon a time there was a small fur trading colony at the bottom of what are now the Great Lakes, but before that there wasn't a whole lot in what is now the cosmopolitan city of Detroit.
Prior to the Civil War Detroit wasn't much more than a shipping stop between Chicago and the rest of east coast. Detroit was mainly a merchant town, and that was about the only purpose the burgeoning city served. That was until after the Civil War when Detroit became a main manufacturing point for rail cars, and with the growth of the railroad and the stretch westward, business started developing. A couple decades later there came a guy named Henry Ford. He had his sights set on a new invention called the automobile. There had been automobiles before old Hank Ford got to work, but they were so expensive that only the very rich could afford them. There weren't a lot of very rich folks in Detroit, and he wanted each one of those people to be able to have a car. Ford knew that the only way to make cars affordable was to make them cheaper and mass produce them. (Hour Detroit July 2002)
It's right around here that some mention of the people and the dynamic of Detroit needs to be introduced. Detroit was primarily white, a mix of mostly Italian and Irish, but there were some African Americans as well that made the migration north after emancipation, but contrary to beliefs about the North, Detroiters and a lot of midwesterners didn't like the sudden influx of African Americans and a lot of them just kept on going to a friendlier and more humane atmosphere in the, then, British-ruled Canada. Detroit has been a racist and segrated town, pretty much, since day one...............
