Mapping Flint

Flint, the Vehicle City, birthplace of the General Motor Company and the United Auto Workers, a vanishing city propelled to the spotlight by one of the largest municipal public health crises in the 21st Century, the Flint Water Crisis

recent posts

  • Map: Crapo Island on the Flint Sanborn Map 1886

    Map: Crapo Island on the Flint Sanborn Map 1886

    Sanborn maps are a useful historical tool and often reveal interesting pieces of the past that are long forgotten. On this fire insurance map in particular I was surprised to see such a sizable island in the Flint River, Crapo Island.

    Named for Henry Crapo, the UM Flint Genesee Historical Collections Center notes the Crapo family to be the biggest impact on Flint. Crapo moved to Flint in the 1850s and had a very successful lumber business. He was elected mayor of Flint in 1860 and then Governor of Michigan for two terms from 1864 to 1869 before retiring. William Crapo Durant, founder of General Motors, is the grandson of Henry and Mary Ann Crapo.

    Now the oddity of Crapo Island appears to be long gone, but I can’t find any reference to when it was removed from the river. In 1907, William Crapo, Henry’s oldest son, presented the island as “Crapo Island Park” to the City of Flint. In 1929, the east channel of the river filled in and Crapo Island became the east riverbank. In 1940, the Flint City Market was built on land that had been part of Crapo Island and the old river channel.

    You can still see how the riverbank bumps out under the 5th Avenue bridge.

  • Mapping Flint: Understanding Flint Geography

    Mapping Flint: Understanding Flint Geography

    Flint, to me, has always been about family and cars. 

    My great grandfather worked for Chevrolet in what became better known as “Chevy in the hole.” My grandfather worked at the Flint Assembly Plant and was an active member of the UAW. My grandmother’s family opened the first Chrysler dealership in the Flint area in 1926 before running the Oldsmobile dealership.

    Both of my parents grew up in Flint with stories of attending community schools, watching the spark plug parades, and ice skating at Atwood Stadium. Actually five members of my immediate family were born at St. Joe’s hospital which closed in 1997. My dad bought his first home on the Bradley Avenue hills of Crim notoriety. 

    My childhood was spent visiting the Cultural Center of the city, taking trips to the Flint Institute of Arts, Longway Planetarium, or the Flint Public Library, learning to swim at Hurley Health and Fitness, running the Crim, and taking classes at Mott Community College. I attended Powers Catholic when it was located in the North End and often volunteered with the St. Luke Center. Most of my family lived in areas of South End near Miller Road, Thread Lake, and Bristol Road.

    Thinking about all the Flint places important to my own story I tried to come up with a way to quickly reference the geography of the city. North, Downtown, and South area helpful geographic divisions. Specific ZIP codes are easy to know from family and business addresses. How do you represent Flint? What are the ways that you reference where you are in the city?

    Produced for Flintside

  • Map: Flint River Indian Reservations 1879

    Map: Flint River Indian Reservations 1879

    Flint’s history is that it was a collection of 11 Indian Reservations along the Saginaw Trail next to the Flint River called Grand Traverse Village. Present day Saginaw Street is the bold line noted by the arrow on the map.

    Indigenous burial mounds were documented along the Flint River in the 1830s and archaeological digs in 1899 noted the presence of historic indigenous villages. The names of these villages became enshrined in the Saginaw Treaty of 1819 that established 11 reservations along the Flint River under Governor Lewis Cass. The reservations constituted 7,041 acres of land along the south bend of the river.

  • Map: Imagine Flint Master Planning 2013

    Map: Imagine Flint Master Planning 2013

    Flint embarked on an ambitious master planning process when it didn’t even have a planning department in 2013. This was the city’s first master plan since 1960. The “Imagine Flint” effort engaged over 500 residents through 280 engagement sessions and hosted community events.

    Flint is currently in another master plan update process for 2024-2025. The plan update was expected to take 18 months, but it’s unclear from the City of Flint website what meetings or opportunities are happening into 2026.

  • Map: Elevated Lead Levels by Flint Wards 2015

    Map: Elevated Lead Levels by Flint Wards 2015

    This map from National Geographic was published with the article: “Five years on, the Flint Water Crisis is nowhere near over.” Much of the water testing in Flint showed elevated lead levels remained high into 2015. The downtown band with Wards 5, 6, and 7 showed the highest levels.

  • Map of Flint 1889

    Map of Flint 1889

    This historical gem from the Library of Congress comes from the “Atlas of Genesee County, Michigan” shows the City of Flint as a much smaller entity than present day with remnants of the Smith’s Indian Reservation that eventually became part of Flint proper. I was surprised to see that Michigan School for the Deaf has held their land as far back as this, but then checked that the school was founded in 1848 and opened in 1854.

  • Map: Flint Water Testing Results 2016

    Map: Flint Water Testing Results 2016

    This site began idea began from my engagement with MSU researchers after the Flint Water Crisis where we focused on mapping food resources that help mitigate lead in the body (high calcium and high vitamin C foods).

    More recently I started noticing that many Flint mapping efforts from the Flint Water Crisis time period were disappearing, breaking, or have been removed altogether.

    One such map was this one from PBS that they mapped on a now assumedly defunct Carto account and the link provided to the State of Michigan’s datasets returns an Error 404 showing the page no longer exists. From the article:

    “We mapped the results of these lead tests for the month of January. These are tests of people’s drinking water more than two months after the city switched back to Lake Huron water from Detroit. We could confirm the addresses of 4,051 drinking water tests in Flint for the month of January. We grouped the lead results into six ranges.

    • 0 ppb: no lead detected in the drinking water
    • 1-4 ppb: the EPA deems this range as acceptable
    • 5-14 ppb: exposure is a concern, but still below an EPA “federal action level”
    • 15-49 ppb: a range above the federal action level for lead, but can be treated by filters
    • 50-149 ppb: reaching dangerous levels, but can be treated by filters
    • 150 and above: a range at which the federal government says water filters might not work”

    Archival map work is critical in the digital age where many of these project can disappear in a moment with no physical backup, no archived datasets, and unfortunately all that is left is a random digital image.

,