DETROIT – City flags, like state flags, can be controversial, but they all mean something to the people who call those places home.
Dearborn’s city flag includes a stylized stamp of Henry Ford and the Quadricycle, his first automobile. It honors Ford’s contributions -- culturally and historically -- to the city.
The flag of Toronto, Ontario features an off-center white outline of its City Hall with a red maple leaf at its base. Phoenix, Arizona has a phoenix on its flag, for obvious reasons.
Detroit’s flag includes the city’s seal -- neither are used all that often in official city documents or correspondence, the city prefers to use its official logo instead. The Seal of Detroit depicts two women, one sadly looks at buildings on fire and the other consoles her by gesturing to the new buildings that will take their place. It includes two Latin mottos, “Speramus Meliora” and “Resurget Cineribus,” which roughly translates to “we hope for better things” and “it will rise from the ashes,” respectively.
The city seal represents the Great Fire of 1805 and the rebuilding of Detroit afterward. Like a phoenix, Detroit has experienced its own renewal and rebirth.
Related: Join us for Detroit Spirit Day downtown on June 11!
June 11, 1805 was a hot, dry and windy day in Detroit. The city had a population of about 600 people at the time and almost all structures were made of wood. It’s believed that a man knocked ashes from his pipe that were taken by the wind and blown into piles of dry hay and straw.
Fire quickly spread. Detroiters formed lines to pass buckets of water to dump on them, but the strong winds fanned and spread the flames. Within six hours, the city was almost completely destroyed. The only buildings still standing were a fort on a hill that overlooked the city and a warehouse on the Detroit River.
More than 100 years of growth were erased.
No one died. Newspapers at the time credit this to the fact that the fire started on a sunny morning -- people were awake and already active when the flames spread.
“The rapidity of the destruction was perhaps unprecedented, but will not appear surprising to anyone previously acquainted with the place. The buildings were mostly old, all of wood, and dry as tinder and extremely crowded together,” read a newspaper account from the time.
Gabriel Richard, a Catholic pastor in the city, organized food and aid from farms on both sides of the Detroit River and arranged federal funding to help rebuild the city. He’s credited with writing the Latin phrase that became the city’s motto.
When the community decided to rebuild, Judge Augustus Woodward argued that the city could improve if it were designed properly. He drew up a plan that featured diagonal roads that radiated from the city’s center, like Paris and Washington D.C. had. As the new city was being constructed, the plan was scaled back, but elements of the plan still remain -- such as streets that radiate from Campus Martius and Grand Circus.
Together, Woodward and Richard would co-found the University of Michigan. Its original building stood near the intersection of Congress and Bates streets, just north of where the Ally Detroit Center stands now. When the Territory of Michigan became the state of Michigan in 1837, the University of Michigan moved from Detroit to its current location in Ann Arbor.
Within 15 years of the fire, Detroit’s population had more than doubled. Like a phoenix, it came back.
