WAYNE COUNTY. 247 



ture, and the companionship of many comrades of like sentiments, coasted 

 along the lakes iu his dug-out canoe, till he came to the straits, ' D'Etroit,' 

 as they called them; but we have so anglicised the name that it has lost its 

 original significance. There he found a fur trading station, a French mili- 

 tary post, a missionary centre and a few settlers — old soldiers, who had taken 

 up lauds and turned their spears into pruning hooks. Francis Navarre was 

 an educated man; and, at one time, was the scrivener for this little colony on 

 the outposts of civilization. 



''At the time he came to the straits a single pear tree which, in 1805, was- 

 said to be one hundred years old, stood within the pickets with which the town 

 was surrounded, where now commerce and capital thrive, and the hum of a. 

 busy industry makes vocal the impulse of teeming thousands: and there it stood, 

 till it fell before the rapacious growth of the metropolis. From this tree, 

 Francis Navarre, when he had selected his claim, fronting the straits, trans- 

 planted two sprouts in his yard." 



Twenty years later these had grown to be large trees, and supplied the 

 sprouts which his son planted on the banks of the Kaisin, and which are to- 

 day known as the " Old pear trees of Monroe." 



Congress had, in 1787, organized the whole region lying northwest of the 

 Ohio river into a Northwest Territory. 



On August 11th, 1796, by act of Congress, Wayne county was established, 

 to include all of Michigan, northern Ohio and Indiana, and part of Illinois 

 and Wisconsin. 



Subsequently, on November 21st, 1815, a proclamation of Governor Cass 

 applied to this territory, so far as the Indian title had been extinguished, cer- 

 tain provisions of law relating to highways and road districts. 



On September 10th, 1822, another and final proclamation was issued by 

 Governor Cass, limiting the county to its present boundaries. 



In the autumn of 1815 the Detroit city market building stood in the center 

 of Woodward avenue, on the south side of Jefferson, with a whipping post 

 at the northeast corner, where criminals were whipped for petty offenses. As 

 recently as 1828, when the writer first came to Detroit, this building still 

 stood in this position. It was a wooden building, boarded vertically, with 

 strips four or five inches wide, with a considerable space between. 



During the summer of 1818 the Walk-in-the-Water, the first steamboat 

 built upon the upper lakes, visited Detroit, having been recently built. She 

 was wrecked some years later. 



Although the settlement of Detroit dates from the landing there of De La 

 Motte Cadillac, on July 24th, 1701, it was not until after the war of 1812 

 with Great Britain, when the sovereignty of the region had become confirm- 

 ed to the United States, and till the Indian title to the lands had been ex- 

 tinguished by treaty, nor yet until the necessities of commerce had supplied 

 convenient facilities for transportation upon the upper lakes, that, with the 

 earlier pulsations of that wonderful avalanche of emigration westward, an 

 occasional emigrant found his way to the township of Plymouth, and to 

 others adjacent, in which a few settlements were effected as early as the spring 

 of 1825, although an occasional settler had located along the river Rouge and 

 in the more immediate vicinity of Detroit at considerably earlier periods. Of 

 these last, however, few authentic records are known now to exist. Within 

 the township of Plymouth, William Starkweather, John Tibbits, John Van- 

 sickle, Roswell Root, Henry Lyon, David Phillips, Gideon P. Benton, A. B. 

 Markham, and perhaps others, became residents during the year 1825. 



