to
Update
is a city in Wayne County in the U.S. state of Michigan. The population was 28,006 at the 2000 census. The Population percent change from 1990 to 2000 was a -9.0% showing a slightly decreasing population. Wyandotte is located in the southeastern lower peninsula, approximately eleven miles south of Detroit on the Detroit River and is part of the collection of communities known as Downriver. Wyandotte is bounded by Southgate (west), Lincoln Park (northwest), Riverview (south) and Ecorse (north).
Wyandotte is a sister city to Komaki, Japan, and each year delegates from Komaki come to Wyandotte to tour the city.
Incorporated as a city in 1867, the site where Wyandotte sits today in the 1700s was a village for the Native American tribe known as the Wyandot or Wendat, part of the Huron nation. It was from here in 1763 that Chief Pontiac plotted his attack on Detroit. The center of the village was near modern-day Eureka Avenue and Oak Street.
In 1818, the Wyandot signed a treaty with the U.S. government relinquishing this land, moving to an area near Flat Rock, Michigan, then to Ohio, Kansas and finally Oklahoma. The name somewhat lives on as Wyandotte County, Kansas.
One of the first white settlers to come to Wyandotte in the years after the Native Americans left was John Biddle, a Pennsylvania-born former Army Major who fought in the War of 1812 (and later went on to a prolific political career, serving as mayor of Detroit, delegate from the Territory of Michigan in the U.S. Congress, president of the Michigan Central Railroad, member and later speaker of the Michigan House of Representatives and one-time candidate for Michigan Governor . (West Jefferson Boulevard, which runs from downtown Detroit south to Monroe County is named renamed Biddle Avenue within Wyandotte city limits.)
Biddle purchased a plot near modern Biddle Avenue and Vinewood Avenue in 1835 and created a farm he called "The Wyandotte." He sold the plot in 1854 to Eber Ward of the Eureka Iron Co. for $44,000. In 1864, he took iron ore from Upper Peninsula and smelted it into iron in huge furnaces which came to be known as Bessemer steel mills, the first in the nation. In 1865, the process created steel rails and allowed an explosion of iron-related businesses to open in the region. As a result, Detroit soon became a major center of iron production, especially for use in stoves (Wyandotte was home to several companies as well, including the Regeant Stove Co.) It would be this technology that would give Henry Ford from nearby Dearborn the capabilities to create large amounts of steel for his automobile assembly lines.
A Eureka representative named John Van Alstyne laid out a master plan for the city in the late 1850s. In 1867, Wyandotte became a city, with Van Alstyne as mayor (a street along Wyandotte's Detroit River is named after him).
Eureka Iron Works prospered through the late 1800s, but suffered a shortage of raw materials. It closed in 1892, but not before Wyandotte became a major hub in the chemical production industry, possible because of the many salt mines deep below the city.