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Sunday 5 October 2014

Detroit

The French explorer and adventurer Antoine de La Mothe Cadillac founded the trading post at Fort Pontchartrain, which later became the city of Detroit on July 24, 1701.

Antoine de La Mothe Cadillac Wikipedia Commons

Cadillac and his party of French colonists began construction of a church two days later. It was named by the settlers in honor of the patron of France, Saint Anne, mother of Mary and grandmother of Jesus and the Detroit River. Ste. Anne de Détroit is the second oldest continuously operating Roman Catholic parish in the United States.

Ste. Anne de Détroit, 
British troops gained control of the settlement in 1760 during the French and Indian War, the North American front of the Seven Years' War between Britain and France.

The United States took possession of Detroit from Great Britain on July 11, 1796. After the US gained independence, following the American Revolutionary War, the British were still occupying forts in the Great Lakes region, including at Detroit. Under the terms of the Jay Treaty, which established the northern border with Canada, Britain ceded Detroit along with other territory in the area.

First page of the Jay Treaty

The United States took possession of Detroit from Great Britain on July 11, 1796 under the terms of the Jay Treaty.

In 1805 a fire consumed large portions of Detroit in the Michigan Territory.

From 1805 to 1847, Detroit was the capital of Michigan.

During the War of 1812, Canadian forces captured and held Detroit for nearly four months.

The first all-breeds dog show in the United States was held in Detroit in 1875.

Detroit residents were the first to be assigned phone numbers in 1879.

The Detroit Tigers became in 1901 the first baseball club to have a logo on its cap, in their case an orange running tiger.

The Cadillac company was named after Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, sieur de Cadillac, the founder of Detroit.

In 1909, the first mile (1.6 km) of concrete roadway in the US was paved on Detroit's Woodward Avenue at a cost of $14,000 (equivalent to $2.06 million in 2013.)

Streetcar on Woodward Avenue during the winter between 1900 and 1910

The Ford Motor Company made Detroit into a boom town. In the first 20 years of the 20th century the city's size quadrupled..

The first commercial radio station, 8MK (now WWJ), begun operations in 1920 in Detroit.

Detroit News was the first newspaper to list daily radio programmes.

Detroit's Eight-mile wall built in 1941 to separate separate black and white communities still stands to this day.

Former newspaper reporter turned Kresge store manager Harry Cunningham opened the first Kmart in a suburb of Detroit in 1962

The tallest department store in the world, Hudson's, flagship store in downtown Detroit closed in 1983 due to high cost of operating.

In 1980, Detroit presented Saddam Hussein with a key to the city

Downtown Detroit


The government of Detroit, with an estimated at $18–20 billion in debt, filed for the largest municipal bankruptcy in US history on July 18, 2013. Detroit was the largest city by population in the U.S. history to file for Chapter 9 bankruptcy, more than twice as large as Stockton, California, which filed in 2012.


Detroit is nicknamed the "Motor City" and is known as the car capital of the world. General Motors, Ford and Chrysler have their offices and many of their plants in and around Detroit.

Detroit is home to one of the largest black communities in the United States, being over 91% African-American.

Detroit has put in nine unsuccessful bids to host the Olympics - the most any city has made without ever hosting them.

The Detroit Mover is a 2.9-mile elevated automated guideway transit system that circles downtown Detroit. The system has 7 stations and operates 20 hours a day, 7 days a week. In 2019, the Detroit People Mover carried over 7 million passengers.

You can drive into Canada from Detroit if you drive directly south.

Here is a list of songs with Detroit in the title.

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