About Grosse Pointe, Michigan
The Pointe was heavily wooded and much of it was swampy, a description that appears to hold true for most of the territory around Detroit in the early days.
It began as a farming and hunting community, the women doing most of the farming, the men the hunting and trading. All farms had water frontage, usually three hundred feet, and they ran back about a mile. The houses were all on the water, for water was the first essential, both for drinking and transportation. This resulted in neighboring houses being close to each other along the lake, but probably not for mutual protection as many people believe.
Pontiac fought the English, Tecumseh - the Americans; but the great majority of the Indians around Detroit were at all times friendly to the French.
Just when Grosse Pointe received its name and what territory it included is unknown. The name was used long before the Americans took over in 1796, and it undoubtedly referred to the broad, flat point, which culminated at the Windmill Pointe lighthouse. The French word "grosse" has a meaning that lies between grande and grasse, and seems well applied to this blunt point. Furthermore, all of the point lying east of Jefferson, the "river road," was the Grand Marais (Great Swamp), and the names Grosse Pointe and Grand Marais were used interchangeably for many years.
The first clearings on the waterfront were largely devoted to orchards, and what fame Grosse Pointe enjoyed up to 1850 attached mainly to them. A federal official visiting the Pointe in 1826 saw little else of merit except the view of the lake.
From 1850 to 1900 the lumbermen took away the woods and wealthy Detroit businessmen took away the lakefront. The early settlers do not appear to have benefited greatly from either operation.
For a half a century Grosse Pointe was Detroit's foremost summer resort, bigger and better summer homes with impressive French names and unlimited scroll-saw trimmings. Blossomed on every road to the Pointe, although nearly impassable in wet weather, abounded in road houses famous for frog leg dinners and the relief of parched throats, the "Elegant Eighties" gave way to the "Gay Nineties," and electric railways began to make the Pointe really accessible; then came automobiles and a good road and one decade saw Grosse Pointe become the year-round suburb of a rapidly growing city.
Subdivisions and villages were organized, the Great War caused a lull, but the "Mad Twenties" more than made up for it, and present day Grosse Pointe with its thousands of people, schools, clubs and lakefront parks came to occupy the wooded shores first seen by LaSalle and Father Louis Hennepin, when they christened Lake Sainte Clair three hundred years ago.
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