Flint had its beginnings in 1819 when fur trader Jacob Smith set up a permanent trading station at the Grand Traverse, the name given by the French where the Saginaw Trail crossed the Flint River. Located midway on the military road between Pontiac and Saginaw, this site had been used by Smith for a number of years, Smith enjoyed a close friendship with the Ojibway chief Neome of the Montrose settlement and he was adopted into the Ojibway tribe. During the Saginaw Treaty negotiations of 1819; Smith and his children, under their Indian names, received tracts of land north of the Flint River within the current city limits of Flint.

Two of Smith’s daughters later married prominent Flint residents. Maria married Colonel Thomas Stockton; Harriet married Major John Garland. Garland’s daughters, Louisa and Mary, also married military men who later served as Confederate officers, General James Longstreet and Colonel George Deas. Starting in 1829, John and Polly Todd were the first of a tide of settlers to arrive in the area. Their tavern and ferry sat at Grand Traverse. To accommodate the northbound travelers, the enterprise was located on the south bank of the river. Todd’s Tavern became the center of activity for Genesee County, named for the county in New York that furnished many of the area’s early residents.

The pioneer period in the flint area was extremely short. Once the settlers were established, sawmills sprang up to turn the abundance of timber into clapboard housing. Most of the settlers became farmers and a community arose to meet their needs. By the 1850’s, 1,800 people called Flint their home. In 1854 the Michigan School for the Dumb and Blind opened on twenty rolling acres donated by Colonel Stockton. The following year, Flint officially became a city.

Transportation difficulties plagued Flint from its beginning. Boggy soil swallowed up the corduroy roads almost as soon as they were laid. At first, the river seemed a solution. Grand schemes were concocted to make Flint a Great Lakes port. The Genesee and Saginaw Navigation Company hoped to make the Flint River navigable from Flint to Saginaw Bay by constructing a canal from Fosters, a small Saginaw community, to the Cass River. This was never done. The company did, however, operate for a time between Flint and Flushing. Then, technology stepped in. Toll-financed plank roads that could be built above the roadbed finally made it possible to travel down Saginaw Street in all kinds of weather. With the advent of railroads, people and goods could move quickly and cheaply.

Lumbering was Flint’s first major industry. The industry first prospered when Henry Howland Crapo, a future governor of Michigan, came to town in the 1850s. The Massachusetts native transformed the economy of the area and paved the way for Flint’s industrial growth. Unlike other eastern financiers, Crapo moved to Flint to manage his investments. The profits stayed in Flint creating a pool of local investment money. Crapo also knew that for the lumbering industry to thrive, a more efficient transportation system was necessary. As a result, he created the Flint-Holly Railway line so that lumber would be moved to market.

At least twelve lumber mills dotted the banks of the Flint River from the present-day University of Michigan-Flint campus west. The largest operations included the following mills: Crapo (0wned by Henry Crapo), Fox & Begole (owned by David Fox and Josiah Begole), Eddy (owned by Jerome Eddy), McFarlan (owned by Alexander McFarlan), Busenbark & Stone (owned by Charles Busenbark and William Stone), Atwood (owned by William Atwood), Beardslee & Gillies (owned by Amzi Beardslee and Andrew Gillies) and Hamilton (owned by William Hamilton). The Flint mill produced a total of 90 million board feet of lumber annually at the height of the lumber boom. By the 1880s the area forests were cut over and large-scale lumbering came to an end. Using the money and business skills honed during the lumbering heyday, Flint was reinvented by many of the same men and became a manufacturing center of road carts and carriages.

The “Big Three” of carriage companies soon emerged. The first, The Paterson Carriage Company, founded by William and A.B. Paterson in 1869, eventually produced 23,000 horse-drawn vehicles a year. Paterson played an important role in the success of the Durant-Dort Carriage Company. Before Durant-Dort had a manufacturing facility, Paterson produced its carriages. The Begole & Fox Lumber Mill became the Flint Wagon Works. Owner Josiah Begole, who became the second Michigan governor from Flint, hired James Whiting as manager.

The other major player was the Durant-Dort Carriage Company. In 1886, twenty- five-year-old William Crapo Durant, grandson of the former lumber baron, and his friend J. Dallas Dort, obtained a $2,000 loan so they could bring the Coldwater cart Company to Flint. On his way back to Flint from Coldwater, Durant sold eight hundred carts even before he had a factory in which to build them!

By 1900 these three companies built more than 100,000 carriages a year, with Durant- Dort producing over half of them. Flint manufactured more carriages than any city in the United States and possibly the world. When two arches were added to the city’s street lighting system to celebrate Flint’s Golden Jubilee in 1905, the arch north of the river bore the famous crown “Flint Vehicle City”.

As the nineteenth century came to a close, wooden carts would soon be replaced by the horseless carriage and Flint reinvented itself again. In 1898, Flint judge Charles Wisner introduced his “buzz wagon,” which was “a big, very noisy contraption with a big one-cylinder motor.” Elsewhere, A. B. C. Hardy, a former Durant-Dort employee, established the Flint Automobile Company.

At the same time, David Buick, a Detroit manufacturer of plumbing supplies who had invented a successful internal combustion engine, entered into negotiations with James Whiting and the other directors of the Flint Wagon Works. The Flint businessmen assumed control of the Buick operation. On September 11, 1903, The Flint Journal boasted that “a splendid new manufacturing company” was coming to Flint. A need for more capital led Whiting to turn to Flint’s most successful businessman, Billy Durant. Durant was skeptical of the horseless carriage. For two months, as historian George May writes in A Most Unique Machine, Durant ran a Buick “under the worst conditions he could find in the Flint area.” Convinced that the Buick was a superior car, Durant turned his attention to building automobiles.

Buick soon became the nation’s most popular automobile. According to May, in a few short years, “Durant established a record unmatched by any other individual… in the entire history of the American automobile industry.” Durant introduced two concepts that define manufacturing today: customer choice and industry consolidation. In 1908 he founded the General Motors Company (GM), by combining Buick with an assortment of auto manufacturers and parts suppliers. Of special significance to Flint was the acquisition of the Weston-Mott Company, which brought Charles Stewart Mott to Flint. Mott’s generosity and that of the Mott foundation has given the community advantages that others can only dream of.

After losing control of GM in 1910, Durant teamed up with former Buick race driver Louis Chevrolet and started another automobile company that featured the Chevrolet nameplate. He regained control of GM in 1915, but lost it once again five years later. Within weeks, Durant was in business again. In 1923 the new Durant Motors factory opened in Flint, but financial difficulties forced Durant to sell the plant to General Motors in 1925.

In 1927 Durant moved to New York City and turned to his lifelong fascination, the stock market. He began investing for his millionaire friends. While his automotive projects were collapsing, Durant made a fortune in the market. When he lost his fortune in the depression, he borrowed the shares from his wife’s trust. He lost those, too. In February 1936 he voluntarily filed for bankruptcy. In the spring of 1940, Durant opened North Flint Recreation, an eighteen-lane bowling alley. A year later, he added a drive-in restaurant. Durant suffered a stroke in Flint and was moved to his home in New York City where he died in 1947.

The 1930s witnessed another chapter in Flint’s rich automotive history-the rise of the United Auto Workers (UAW). On the morning of December 30, 1936, striking workers camped inside the GM factories. What became the nation’s most famous “sit-down strike,” it lasted forty-four days. As auto production ground to a virtual halt, GM agreed to recognize the UAW as the sole bargaining agent for its workers. In addition to wage increases, the workers acquired health insurance, seniority protection, a highly structured grievance  procedure  and a growing measure of control over work pace and environment that now often includes worker input into plant-level decisions. The American automobile worker moved solidly into the middle class.

During World War II, Flint threw itself into arming the nation. As its men marched off to war; thousands of other men and women headed into the factories and turned out airplane engine components, ship instruments, tanks, shells, shot and machine guns. Most notably, Buick produced the Hellcat, a fast-moving tank destroyer. The city’s joy at war’s end was tempered by the human toll taken- almost 900 Flint citizens died and 1,800 were wounded.

Flint boomed in the 1950s. The city celebrated its centennial with parades, fireworks and festivities. The College and Cultural Center – a block of land set aside for cultural and educational purposes-grew Out of this celebration. The College and Cultural Center included the Flint Institute of Music, the Flint Institute of Arts, the Longway Planetarium, the Bower Theater, the Sloan Museum, the Buick Gallery and Research Center, the Whiting Auditorium and the Sarvis Center. Flint Junior college (present-day Mott Community College) moved into new buildings on its Court Street campus, the University of Michigan-Flint was established and a new city hall was built.

In 1957, General Motors marked the production of its 50 millionth vehicle with a gala celebration. But the boom times did not last. The cyclical nature of the automobile industry, automation, foreign competition, lower business costs elsewhere and North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) drained many of the automotive jobs from the area. General Motors employment dropped form 82,000 in 1970 to just over 14,500 today.

It was time for Flint to reinvent itself and this time, there was no Henry Crapo, Billy Durant or James Whiting to lead the way. It has been a slow process, led by the growth of the area’s colleges and universities. The University of Michigan-Flint campus spans both sides of the Flint River along Riverbank Park downtown. Mott Community College has opened a state-of-the-art Regional Technology Center. Kettering University (formerly General Motors Institute) is involved in fuel cell research and has begun a research collaborative with the McLaren Medical Center. Baker and Davenport Colleges are flourishing. The Flint Institute of Music and the Flint Institute of Arts unveiled expanded renovated facilities. Private investment and a grant from the Ruth Mott Foundation are changing the face of Saginaw Street. New facades, street landscaping, loft apartments and the recreated lighted arches frame new businesses. Rowe Engineering recently leased office space that will bring two hundred new jobs to the down-town business community. Finally, Flint may again find a niche in transportation as plans unfold to make Bishop Airport a hub for a combined truck, air and train distribution network.

Written by Sally Jaeger, Past President of the Genesee County Historical Society