Just as we were getting ready to get over it, the moon revealed a great black bear on the other side, which, standing upright on its haunches and dragging its chain, made as clear as it could its intention of giving us a fraternal welcome. ‘What a devil of a country this is,’ I said, ‘where one has bears for watch dogs?’”
Well, that would be Flint, muthafucka. (Pardon my French.)
Unsure of how to proceed but unwilling to tangle with a bear, Tocqueville and Beaumont called out until a man appeared at the cabin window. He invited them inside and gave the bear permission to turn in for the night: “Trinc, go to bed. To your kennel, I tell you. Those are not robbers.”
Despite the need for such elaborate security measures—rendering the popularity of pit bulls in modern Flint almost quaint by comparison—the Flint settlement grew steadily. Before long, against all odds, it was seen as a desirable place to live. “The tide of emigration is rapidly increasing,” a settler observed in a letter dated November 28, 1837, just a few months after Michigan became a state. “The village presents a fine appearance in the evening when going in from our way, the lights from so many undiscernible windows upon the heights among the trees and bushes, have the appearance of beacons to guide the weary traveler.”
The local chamber of commerce couldn’t have come up with a better promotional blurb. Settlers from New England and New York began arriving, often combining farming and fur trapping to make a decent living. Businesses opened to serve the growing population. Before long, Flint was a prosperous county seat known for tree-lined streets, comfortable wood-framed houses, and spacious lawns.
The City of Flint was incorporated in 1855. The name is appropriate for a tough frontier town that would grow into a hardworking industrial center. But no one is quite sure how the name came to attach itself to the river crossing. The unpopularity of the French probably eliminated Grande Traverse as an option, although an anglicized version lives on today as a major street. Other Michigan cities—Kalamazoo, Muskegon, and Saginaw, for example—simply adopted the Native American names already in place. But the Chippewa names for the Flint area were far more challenging for white Americans. Muscatawingh, which translated to “an open and burned-over plain,” didn’t catch on, for obvious reasons. Pewonigowink, meaning “place of flints,” was equally perplexing for English speakers, but its simple translation did the trick, even though the area wasn’t particularly flinty. Perhaps the name was simply the easiest to pronounce. “After wrestling for several years with these Chippewa jaw breakers, the early settlers ended the struggle by calling both river and settlement Flint, and Flint they are,” according to Colonel E.H. Thomson, one of the city’s prominent early citizens. So much for symbolism. Forget creativity. Flint residents were a practical lot from the beginning.
Though the city chose the moniker of least resistance, it appears it was never meant to be an easy-going municipality. Slow and steady just weren’t part of its civic DNA. The fur trade was declining, but there was another natural resource to be exploited. An unsullied white pine forest stretched for miles on either side of the winding river. From 1855 to 1880, Flint emerged as a thriving lumber town, and that meant prosperity and a healthy dose of drunken buffoonery. “The bearded lumbermen with their coonskin caps, red sashes, and hobnailed boots brawled from tavern to tavern,” explained Carl Crow in a 1945 history of the city commissioned by General Motors and characterized by endearingly flamboyant prose. “Lumbering was rough business and lumbermen were rough men. They worked hard, played hard, and usually drank quantities of hard liquor. There was a story throughout the logging camps that some of the lumberjacks would cheerfully eat pine chips or sawdust if generously moistened with whisky.” Now that sounds like the Flint I know. The drinking part, not the lumberjack fashion statements.
The city reached its peak as a lumber town around 1870, when the population climbed to five thousand and the city boasted eighteen lumber dealers, eleven sawmills, nine planing mills, a box-making factory, and a dealer in pine lands. (I couldn’t get a count on bars and taverns, but I’m sure it was impressive.) At its height, the lumber industry generated more than $1 million annually for Flint.
In the midst of this abundance, the next big thing was already emerging. The lumber industry required transportation. Oxcarts were needed to haul logs from forest to town. Farmers claiming the deforested land needed wagons. And well-off shopkeepers and other locals needed horse-drawn vehicles to get around town. By the 1880s, when there weren’t enough trees left to keep the lumber industry from fading, it didn’t take carriage making long to ramp up and take its place. Flint may have exhausted its supply of high-quality pine, but there were buggies to be made and plenty of people to buy them.
By the turn of the century, the city’s numerous carriage firms were producing 150,000 vehicles annually. One merchant was selling 23,000 a year all over the country and maintained a permanent office on Broadway in New York City. Over half of the roughly thirteen thousand Flint residents were connected with the carriage business in what was now known as the “Vehicle City,” a catchy nickname that had nothing to do with automobiles. Yet.
The transition was possible because Flint’s lumber industry was run by local entrepreneurs who had a stake in the community. They weren’t looking to make a quick profit and then hit the road. “In other places the timber had been cut by companies from out of state, companies which regularly remitted their profits for deposit in eastern banks,” Crow wrote. “When their mills closed down, the only mementos of the former prosperity they left consisted of piles of rotting sawdust and mill buildings which had been stripped of machinery.”
Alas, Flint would eventually suffer a similar fate when GM decided to skip town, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We’re coming to the really good part of Flint’s history, when the growth and good times seemed limitless. The horse and buggy era didn’t have many years left, and the city was poised to transform itself once again. This time into the epicenter of the automobile industry, the headquarters of the American Dream.
6
The Road to Prosperity
I made a surprising discovery as I blogged about Flint and immersed myself in its history for the first time. In the early days of the auto industry, my moribund hometown had been the gritty equivalent of Silicon Valley, a freewheeling city with go-getters eager to put their ideas on the line. A place where people sought their fortune. Billy Durant is a perfect example. The charismatic grandson of a local lumber baron, he dropped out of high school and sold cigars before he teamed up with his friend J. Dallas Dort to launch a carriage company with two thousand dollars of someone else’s money. By 1900, it was the largest horse-drawn vehicle maker in the country, if not the world. Durant was initially so skeptical of automobiles that he allegedly forbade his daughter to ride in one, but that didn’t stop him from investing heavily in Buick, one of the many manufacturers emerging at the turn of the century. Before long, Buicks were the most popular cars in the country.
A mesmerizing salesman, Durant believed in offering consumers variety and consolidating the gaggle of competing car companies. With that in mind, he combined Buick with an assortment of automakers and parts suppliers to form General Motors in 1908. Although based in Flint, GM was incorporated in New Jersey, a state that placed no restriction on the amount of stock a venture could issue, regardless of its actual assets. This allowed Durant to dazzle investors with his vision for the future rather than the company’s current reality.
Durant was not easily satisfied. After marrying one of the prettiest girls in Flint in his younger days, he divorced her when he was in his midforties to wed his twenty-one-year-old secretary. He overextended GM in his rush to expand the company and was forced out by skittish financiers in 1910. After teaming up with Louis Chevrolet, he managed to regain control five years later, only to get bounced for good in 1920. He was replaced by Alfred P. Sloan, who lacked Durant’s endearing panache and dapper style but relied on a shrewd, methodical management
