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HISTORICAL ASSOCIATIONS CONNECTED WITH WYANDOTTE AND
VICINITY BY DR. E. P. CHRISTIAN
The locality of Wyandotte had been an aboriginal settlement. Perhaps owing to this fact, it has been kept longer from white settlers seeking farms, for the Indians do not destroy the forests, living mainly by fishing and hunting; the latter not only for food but for peltries for barter. They seek the neighborhood of forests for settlement, and desire their preservation; and certain it is, that the locality on which Wyandotte stands, determined its choice as a site for furnaces and rolling-mills, by reason of the large tract of heavily wooded land covering and adjoining which would be available for manufacturing the superior quality of charcoal melted iron. This was one of
the determining causes of its selection, others were such physical character istics as had made it a point of election by the Indians, which we shall recount, and by reason of the facilities it offered for receiving the ores to be smelted from the mines of Lake Superior, the time for fluxes from the neighboring Monguagon quarries and the coal via the lake ports of Pennsylvania and Ohio from the mines of those states.
Looking on the map one will see Wyandotte located nearly midway between Lakes St. Clair and Erie. The Ecorse river empties into the Detroit river about two miles north of the center of Wyandotte, and the Monguagon about the same distance below, or south. From the mouth of the Rouge, half way between Wyandotte and Woodward avenue, to some distance south of the northern limits of Wyandotte, a marshy border lines the whole shore of the Detroit river, with the exception of about half a mile each side of the mouth of the Ecorse, on the north side where the village of Ecorse or Grandport stands, and on the south, the river front of the farm of the late Hon. H. H. Emmons.
Michigan
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