River Raisin National Battlefield Park

The River Raisin — Nmézibe, the Sturgeon River, to the Bodéwadmi (Potawatomi) — winds across a level plain to the western shore of Lake Erie, between the Maumee and Detroit river corridors that open onto much of the continent. Before it was engineered in the late 1800s, its lower course ran through oak woodland, hardwood forest, prairie, marsh and lagoon, and its sturgeon fishery, the 2019 historic resource study suggests, likely dates to the Late Archaic period. By the early 1800s French-speaking habitants had built Frenchtown along its banks, one of the only French ribbon-farm settlements founded in U.S. territory after the Revolution, near villages that were mostly Bodéwadmi, Odawa (Ottawa) and Wyandot. [1]

On January 18, 1813, U.S. forces drove a British garrison out of Frenchtown. Four days later a British force of 1,200, half of them Native Americans, routed the Americans; on January 23 Native warriors killed wounded American prisoners left in the town — taking revenge, the park brochure says, for William Henry Harrison’s depredations on their people, homes and crops. “Remember the Raisin!” became the American rallying cry. [2] Approximately one of every five U.S. soldiers killed during the battles of the War of 1812 died at Frenchtown, the 2012 foundation document says, and the second battle was the last major victory of the intertribal alliance formed by Tecumseh. [3]

Frenchtown never fully recovered. The River Raisin Paper Company, established in 1910, built on portions of the battlefield, and its mill expanded until it covered most of the battle site by the mid-20th century; it was largely abandoned in 1995. [3] [1] As the mill was demolished, legislation creating the park was signed into law in March 2009, and River Raisin National Battlefield Park was established on October 22, 2010. [3] [2]