Detroit

Downtown Detroit from the air

Henry Ford and the tunnel from Detroit to Windsor, Ontario Canada, feature in my family history.  My grandfather on my father's side was born on a farm about 60 miles north of St Louis on the Illinois side. His father had grown up a child of privileged who never really learned how to work, he read Latin and Greek from a private tutored education and really didn't know what hit him when he spent the last of his inheritance and was told he needed to earn a living.  He had a dozen children by then and tried farming. But it was not good farm land and he was not a good farmer and the family barely scraped by.  Ford came through town recruiting workers for five-dollars a day - they offered him a job and he sold the farm and moved to Detroit.  He worked in the power house at Henry Ford's Fairlane Estate for 20 years, he was there the night Henry died.  My father's mother's family came to Detroit so my great grandfather could build the tunnel under the Dettroit River to Canada (or was it built from Canada to Detroit?) He was an English coal miner, who came to States to dig tunnels.  His specialty was working in compressed air in soft soils, the tunnel under the river is just below the muck level in very soft soils. The two families lived a couple of blocks apart and Red and the little English girl fell in love and married in 1926.  

I was born about 70 miles due north of Detroit and visited the city often while I was growing up.  Today it is primarily a place people change planes as a prime hub city for Delta.  I will pass through there in August.