The Watershed Approach - Urban Watersheds: Geology, Contamination, and Sustainable Development - page 5

goods, drugs and chemicals, metal working, and food production. In 1896, Charles B. King
determined Detroit's destiny when he drove a horseless carriage on the city streets. Soon
Henry Ford introduced his own version of this conveyance, and Detroit was on its way to
becoming the automobile capital of the world. Along with Ford, such automotive pioneers
as W.C. Durant, Walter P. Chrysler, Ransom Olds, Henry Leland, and the Dodge brothers
laid the foundation for the companies that emerged as the Big Three automakers—Ford,
General Motors, and Chrysler—by the latter half of the twentieth century (Sugrue 2005).
The characteristics of site and situation present in Detroit during the 1800s had changed,
largely due to the regionally evolving locations of population, coal, and steel-making. By
1900, Detroit was in the center of America's industrial heartland—a region that extended
from lower New England down to Pennsylvania and across the Appalachians westward
through Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. All of the raw materials needed for automobile pro-
duction were easily accessible to the city by the Great Lakes waterways and by rail. The
raw materials within easy reach included the coal in Pennsylvania and West Virginia; the
steel in the mills of Pittsburgh, Youngstown, Cleveland, Gary, and Chicago; the limestone
and gypsum near Cleveland; and the iron and copper ore embedded in the regions of
northern Michigan and Minnesota. In addition, as shown by Figure 1.2, Detroit's central
location at the confluence of East and Midwest gave its auto producers easy access to the
capital and markets necessary for its phenomenal growth (Sugrue 2005).
Detroit's first auto plants were small operations, but they contributed significant modi-
fications to the Rouge watershed. Between 1910 and 1920, Henry Ford dammed the Rouge
River at six locations to supply power to some of the small factories producing parts for

Iron ore

Michigan Limestone

Buffalo
Steel

Auto

Steel

New York

Detroit

Chicago

Cleveland

Pennsylvania

Illinois

Indiana Pittsburgh

Coal

Ohio

West
Virginia

Kentucky

0 200 400 600 800 1000 km

N

FIGURE 1.2
Detroit's central location in the U.S. industrial heartland in 1900; Map by Martin M. Kaufman. (From Sugrue,
T.J, From motor city to motor metropolis: How the automobile industry reshaped urban America, Automobile in
American Life and Society website Dearborn: Henry Ford Museum and University of Michigan, http://www.
autolife.umd.umich.edu (accessed May 17, 2010), 2005.)