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Clare Downtown History |
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Downtown Clare, Michigan, 1865-1940 This project captures the origins and growth of a small town in central Michigan from the early days of the lumbering boom, through development as an agricultural and rail center, to the oil boom of the 1930s. What follows is a sample from the beginnings of the town. Clare Before Clare Native Americans lived in the area of Clare from earliest times. The Ottawa were most numerous in the middle Lower Peninsula when Clare’s story begins. In years preceding Huron tribes had moved in from the east and southeast while Ojibwe came from the north, where they dominated the Upper Peninsula. Tribes were in constant conflict over hunting grounds and within themselves subject to ever shifting arrangements of leadership and policy. They were essentially hunters and gatherers, that is, they were not sedentary agriculturalists. Bottom lands of rivers were rich sources of both game and plant food. The native name of the Tobacco River reflects this fact: it is a gloss on the Native American name. The two possibilities given by later authors, Assemoqua and Samaquasebing, both contain the Ojibwe root for ‘tobacco’; the former could be translated as “Tobacco woman,” while the latter would be “Tobacco Woman River”. Presumably Ojibwe gathered wild tobacco along the banks of this river system and so gave it its name. Tradition says that there was an early settlement by the Indians in the land just north of the Tobacco River, where it crosses Business US 127, but there is no specific evidence for this; given their semi-nomadic nature as hunter-gatherers, this is not surprising. (fig. 1) Neither is there any indication that early French explorers ever made it to the South Branch of the Tobacco River, although it is just possible that Father Nouvel visited the area when he was in the vicinity of Midland in 1674. Early evangelization, exploration, and exploitation were concentrated on the Upper Peninsula and the routes leading to it via the Detroit River and Lake Huron. The Saginaw River basin was simply bypassed. Even after Detroit was founded in |
