Ecorse: a Downriver town named for birch bark

Say “Ecorse” and you’re saying a French word for tree bark, worn down by two centuries of American mouths. When French settlers came to this stretch of the Detroit River in the late 1700s, the little stream running into it was crowded with birch trees, and they named it the Rivière aux Écorces — the river of the barks. Birch bark was worth naming a river for: the local Ottawa and Potawatomi peeled it to build canoes and wrap their dead. The town that grew at the river’s mouth took the name and let the accent marks fall off. Écorces became Ecorse.

That makes Ecorse one of the oldest communities in Wayne County — older than the United States, settled by French habitants when this was still frontier between empires. For a long time it was a sleepy riverfront village of fishermen and farmers.

Then steel found it. Ecorse sits on a deep, working channel of the Detroit River, and in the 20th century that riverbank filled with heavy industry — Great Lakes Steel rose along the water, and Ecorse became a mill town, its skyline traded for blast furnaces and ore boats. The quiet river of birches turned into a heavy industrial waterway, with freighters sliding past backyards.

The birches are long gone, paved and built over, and most people who live here now would never guess their hometown is named for them. But the river is still right there at the foot of the streets, and the name still carries the memory of a time when the most valuable thing on this bank wasn’t steel or coal — it was bark you could peel by hand and shape into a boat.