06/08/2026
Micheal Mccoy Downriver History and facts
Informative from Wyandotte News herald in 1958 about Southgate becoming a city .
To Southgate: The Challenge
That worthy genileman, along with Jean Baptiste Rousseau, Joseph Bondic. Alexia Discompte Labadie, Louis LeDuc and Alexandre Jandron were the early settlers of a small community known as Grandport which, in 1836. was founded by Simon Rousson, Armand Labode, Louis Bouras sau and Phineas White as the Township of Ecorse.
Ecorse Townahip is now a city, known as Southgate., Overnight, to a lot of its residents and neighbors, it emerges from a sleepy cocoon and the very air seems dif- ferent. Its eight square miles embracing 28.250 people, which once was known as the burial ground of the Wyandots (Indi- ans) now is teeming and seething in the suckling stages of what its proponents hope will be a long and eventful and pros- perous municipal life.
It took 122 years for the community founded as Grandport to evolve, through township and village status that saw its houndaries whittled and gnawed at by se- ceding groups of early-day residents who in- corporated as Taylor Township. Browns town Township, Monguagon, Wyandotte, Allen Park, Lincoln Park, Riverview. before what must haye at one time been the dream of Goodell, Rousseau and Rous- son became a reality.
During those years it has been, to all intents and purposes, a "good place to live, and rear a family."
What is expected of the infant City of Southgate now? What changes will be made? Right away? Or in the foreseeable
In the 1870's a weekly newspaper pub- lished in Wyandotte known as the Enter prise, at the request of Supervisor Hya- cinthe. R. Riopelle, listed its assets thus: "Of livestock it shows 1.036 horses, 944 milch cows, 828 young cattle, 2,744 hogs,
248 sheep, 4 heads of work cattle, 6,660 büshels of wheat. 38,438 bushels of corn, 37,140 bushels of oats, 744 busheis of wool, 504 bushels of rye, 8,816 bushels of pota- toes, 3.224 busheis of hay, and 2,680 bushels if buckwbeat.
Today.. Southgate's assets are meas- ured in different terms.
It embraces only eight square miles where once it had more than 30, but it still has room to grow.
Its population of 28,250 has, according to the former township's planning consult- ant and commission, a potential growth of
65,000.
Its assessed valuation, even without the benent of heavy industry to provide a tax base, is more than 536,000,000 which Wayne County has equalized to $46,000,000.
It has the land to rezone industrial and provide a tax base for expanded schools. expanded "city" services, and expanded "privileges of citizenship."
It has an able, alert, well-trained police force manned by 16 full-time employes and twice that many reserves organized as auxiliary police, wno have at their dis- posal five mobile unit vehicles including an oxygen-equipped rescue wagon; a well-train ed fre department of 8 men on full time and 24 rotating volunteers; its own radio communications hook-up: and it has am- bitious, farsighted men and women of vision at the helm
More schools will be needed, more pav- ing, more sewers, more water, more recrea tion facilities, more money with which to pay for these things, and more courage.
The People of Southgate have demon- strated their courage and ther ambitions in their decision to become a city. Now it is up to the infant city's newly-elected officials to make those dreams' a reality.
But. don't expect them to do it overnight.
