Ecorse: a Downriver town named for birch bark

Ecorse really is a bark name, but the careful version is simpler than the old local tale. In a federal place-name guide published in 1902, geographer Henry Gannett wrote that the town was named for the Ecorse River. He explained that the French word means the bark of a tree and connected the river’s name with birch and other bark found along its banks.

Wayne County adds the settlement timeline. Native communities lived in the area before Europeans arrived. French settlers came during the last two decades of the 18th century and called the place “The River of the Barks.” That means the earlier version of this page was wrong to say the French settlement was older than the United States. The county says English-speaking settlers used the name Grand Port in 1836, and the settlement incorporated as the village of Ecorse in 1902.

The industrial city came later. Wayne County dates Ecorse’s first steel mill, the Michigan Steel Mill, to 1923 and its incorporation as a city to 1941. The name is much older than that industrial chapter: a short reminder that this Detroit River community took its identity from a smaller river and the bark once associated with its banks.