Gibraltar, Michigan

Gibraltar sits at the southern end of Metro Detroit, where the Detroit River widens before it meets Lake Erie. People were living here as early as eighteen eleven, not long after the Treaty of Detroit in eighteen oh seven opened southeastern Michigan to formal American settlement. The land company that platted the village in eighteen thirty-seven named it after the famous British rock at the mouth of the Mediterranean, perhaps for the sense of strength the riverbank position conveyed.

For most of its life Gibraltar remained a quiet river community, too small to register on most maps. It only became an official village in nineteen fifty-four and a city in nineteen sixty-one. Today it is one of the smallest cities in Wayne County, still hugging that narrow stretch of river about twenty-two miles south of Detroit.