History of Green Bay, Wisconsin, USA

Green Bay is Wisconsin's oldest city.
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The area was visited in 1634 by Jean Nicolet, a French explorer who named it La Baye Verte ("The Green Bay") because of the greenish colour of the water. By 1655 a fur-trading post had been established, and Green Bay became the gateway to a trade route that connected the Fox, Wisconsin, and Mississippi rivers. In 1671 Claude-Jean Allouez, a Jesuit, founded a mission at De Pere, and two years later the French explorers Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet traveled through the bay and southward down the Fox on their journey to the Mississippi River. A fort built by the French (1717) at the mouth of the river became the heart of a small French Canadian fur-trading community until after the French and Indian War (1754–63), when the British took control of the area. British traders called the site Green Bay, and the French name was gradually dropped. The United States took possession after the War of 1812 and built Fort Howard (1816) within the present limits of Green Bay. The city was laid out in the 1830s, and Wisconsin’s earliest newspaper, the Green Bay Intelligencer, appeared in 1833. With the decline of the fur trade and the opening (1825) of the Erie Canal, Green Bay developed as a lumbering and agricultural centre.