According to Wikipedia, Jean Baptiste Point du Sable (also spelled Point de Sable, Point au Sable, Point Sable, Pointe DuSable, Pointe du Sable^{[n 1]}; before 1750^{[n 2]} – August 28, 1818) is regarded as the first permanent non-Indigenous settler of what would later become Chicago, Illinois, and is recognized as the “Founder of Chicago”.^[7] A school, museum, harbor, park, bridge, and road have been named in his honor. The site where he settled near the mouth of the Chicago River around the 1780s is recognized as a National Historic Landmark, now located in Pioneer Court.

Point du Sable was of African descent, but little else is known of his early life prior to the 1770s. He may have been born on the island of Haiti around 1745 to a French mariner and a mother who was a slave of African descent. During his career, the areas where he settled and traded around the Great Lakes and in the Illinois Country changed hands several times between France, Britain, Spain and the United States. Described as handsome and well educated, Point du Sable married a Potawatomi Native American woman, Kitihawa, and they had two children. In 1779, during the American Revolutionary War, he was arrested by the British on suspicion of being an American Patriot sympathizer. In the early 1780s he worked for the British lieutenant-governor of Michilimackinac on an estate at what is now St. Clair, Michigan.

Point du Sable is first recorded as living at the mouth of the Chicago River in a trader’s journal of early 1790. By then he had established an extensive and prosperous trading settlement in what later became the City of Chicago. He sold his Chicago River property in 1800 and moved to the port of St. Charles, where he was licensed to run a ferry across the Missouri River. Point du Sable’s successful role in developing the Chicago River settlement was little recognized until the mid-20th century.

We were very interested in the many bridges in Chicago. They are called “Trunnion Bascule Bridges”; they rotate vertically about trunnions (axles) on the river bank and bascule describes a family of draw bridges that use counterweights to assist in the vertical movement of bridge leaf. You can see the huge concrete counterweight on the left in the above picture. The clear protective barrier under the bridge (to prevent anything from falling on pedestrians) is called an”eyelash”.

The bridges are opened twice a week in May and October to let people with tall-masted boats bring them to the lake since the river freezes in the winter. While many people think this is a bothersome disruption, the bridges, some of them 100 years old, used to be opened on demand.

After 1910, involvement from the Chicago Plan Commission and architect Edward Bennett improved the bridges’ architectural elements, including bridge houses. These houses represent many major architectural styles, including Art Deco, Beaux-Arts and Modernism. The modern building on the left was built around the bridge house.

As you might guess, we are in Chicago. We went on an architecture tour that was rich with Chicago history as well, so I will share several posts with interesting Chicago factoids we learned. The first is about the great Chicago fire of 1871 that destroyed much of the city.

The myth is that a woman named Catherine O’Leary was milking her cow when the cow kicked over a lantern, igniting the barn and starting the fire. So is it true? Nope!

In 1997, the Chicago City Council went so far as exonerating the cow and its owner

Published October 7, 2021 • Updated on October 7, 2021

Chicago seems to like to pin the blame for its misfortune on farm animals. For decades the Cubs’ failure to get to the World Series was the fault of a goat that was once kicked out of Wrigley Field. And for well over a century, a cow belonging to Mrs. O’Leary caused the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

But just as baseball fans know the Cubs’ pre-2016 shortcomings had nothing to do with a curse put on the team by a goat’s angry owner, historians say there is no evidence that the massive blaze that destroyed a huge swath of Chicago and displaced about a third of its residents began when Catherine O’Leary’s cow kicked over a lantern.

Indeed, nobody puts much stock in that story these days. In 1997, the Chicago City Council went so far as exonerating the cow and its owner.

“The family is still mad about how she was treated,” Peggy Knight, O’Leary’s great-great granddaughter, told The Associated Press on Thursday, a day before the 150th anniversary of the start of the fire. “She did not deserve that.”

How the immigrant from Ireland came to be blamed is a familiar story: She was a victim of prejudice and circumstance.

The fire started in or near her home and her family’s barn. And while it destroyed much of the city, it miraculously spared her own house.

More importantly, O’Leary was easy to blame because of who she was and what she represented

We stopped for lunch in Ann Arbor, college town extraordinaire. The similarities to Ithaca are striking.

One difference between Ithaca and Ann Arbor is that Ann Arbor already has sustainable municipal power. The Ann Arbor Sustainable Energy Utility According to their website, “the Ann Arbor SEU is a community-owned energy utility that provides electricity from local solar and battery storage systems installed on homes and businesses throughout the city. The SEU provides 100% clean, reliable, locally built, and affordable electricity; built by the community, for the community.” I am curious about why there is not much talk about battery storage systems in Ithaca.

Well, we are heading out again on our annual trip to visit our son, Sebby in Wisconsin. It is getting challenging to find new routes and places to explore. This time we plan to go North through Canada and stop in Detroit (which we have never explored) and Chicago. I will share what we see and learn along the way. Hope you will join us in this adventure!

Yesterday we visited Covert, Michigan, a tiny town of 2,502 people on the shores of Lake Michigan, where there are many parks and most people own their own modest homes. Covert has a unique history. Ever since it’s founding in the 1860’s, the town has been integrated, an anomaly for conservative western Michigan.

The school had both black and white students starting in the 1860s. Blacks were elected to numerous positions from 1868 on.^[4] The Covert cemetery is the final resting place of both black and white Civil War veterans.^[5] The town was not formed by abolitionists or as a freed-black settlement; It was just a bunch of New England whites and former slaves who didn’t mind the color of each other’s skin, working together to carve a community out of the Michigan wilderness.

According to the Detroit News article about Covert:

“For 151 years, it has been a land of racial hopes and dreams. Settled by whites and blacks just after the Civil War, it remains the most diverse community in Michigan, according to an analysis of census and demographic data. The different races sat together in one-room schoolhouses in the early 1900s, danced together at sock hops in the 1950s, and were buried side by side at the end of the century, as attested by photos at the Covert Historical Museum. ‘We’ve always looked out for each other,’ said Barbara Rose, 70, a former supervisor who has lived here since 1952. ‘We’ve always come together whenever there’s bad stuff.’”

In 1866, these town folk joined together and quietly flaunted racial laws and customs. It was illegal for whites and blacks to attend school together so the township omitted the race of students when sending rolls to Lansing for state aid, said Anna-Lisa Cox, who wrote a book about the town called A Stronger Kinship: One Town’s Extraordinary Story of Hope and Faith . In 1868, the same year Michigan voters rejected the right of blacks to vote, Covert elected Dawson Pompey, a black farmer who was the son of a slave, to supervise the building of roads, Cox said. By the end of the century, the township had elected 29 blacks as township trustees, constables, drain commissioners and election inspectors, and the first black justice of the peace in Michigan.

In recent years, the beliefs of long-time Covert residents are being tested by a large influx of Latinos, who now are 28% of the Covert population.. They came for the fruit farming. This part of Michigan is known as the Michigan’s Fruit Basket, where pears, peaches, apples, apricots are grown. In Covert, it’s blueberries. Many immigrants came from Chicago, drawn to Covert because it feels like their home in rural Mexico. Some have been able to buy small blueberry farms.

At first, the transition was difficult. Tempers flared between Black and Latino students at the high school. Teachers struggled to communicate with Spanish-speaking students. Many town residents were slow to accept the newcomers because they expected them to leave after the growing season like farm workers in the past. But these folks had come to stay.

Gradually the students got used to each other and tensions eased. Maria Gallegos was elected to the school board in 2014 and became president last year. The older folks, who are proud of the town’s legacy, had an easier time of it. “Nobody cares if someone is black or white or Hispanic,” said Jean Robinson, 75, who was born in Covert and is secretary of the museum board. “We don’t look at color.”