History
Grosse Pointe, recognized for its historic reputation for scenery and landscape, has grown from a colonial outpost and a fertile area for small orchard owners and farmers to a coastal community with prime real estate chosen for grand estates.
The Grosse Pointes were first settled by French farmers in the 1750s after the establishment of the French Fort Pontchartrain. Members of the British empire began arriving around the time of the Revolutionary War. In the 19th century Grosse Pointe continued to be the site of lakefront ribbon farms (which are long narrow farms that each adjoin the lake, useful for irrigation and early transportation needs). Beginning in the 1850s, wealthy residents of Detroit began building second homes in the Grosse Pointe area, and soon afterward, hunting, fishing, and golf clubs appeared. Some grand estates arose in the late 19th century, and with the dawn of the automobile after 1900, Grosse Pointe became a preferred suburb for business executives in addition to a retreat for wealthy Detroiters. By the 1930s, most of the southern and western areas of Grosse Pointe contained established neighborhoods, with remaining gaps and the northern sections such as Grosse Pointe Woods developing after the 1930s.
A passenger rail line that connected Detroit to Mt. Clemens along the shore was operational by the late 1890s, making Grosse Pointe more accessible. As the automobile became the primary method of transportation and the rail line decommissioned, the vista of what became Lake Shore Drive gradually improved. Lakeside estates are accessed from Lake Shore Drive and Jefferson Avenue.
Over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries, Grosse Pointe has gained a reputation as a notable American suburb; entrepreneurial leadership, recreational activities afforded by the Great Lakes waterway, an international border with Canada, and a focus on quality of education contributed to the successful development of the region. The Russell Alger, Jr., House, at 32 Lake Shore Dr., serves as the Grosse Pointe War Memorial. Grosse Pointe contains fifteen recognized Michigan historical markers.
Read more about this topic: Grosse Pointe
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“A country grows in history not only because of the heroism of its troops on the field of battle, it grows also when it turns to justice and to right for the conservation of its interests.”
—Aristide Briand (1862–1932)
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“History ... is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
But what experience and history teach is this—that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)