Surrounded on all sides by the City of Detroit, Hamtramck, Michigan, a city in Wayne County, was named after a French Revolutionary War hero, Colonel Jean Francois Hamtramck, and originally settled by French émigrés from Quebec. By the early 1900s, it was a German-American farming village of about 500 people. Then, with the opening of the Dodge Brothers automobile plant in 1914, Hamtramck attracted large numbers of Polish laborers and its population swelled from about 3,600 in 1910 to over 46,000 by 1920. Hamtramck became a city in 1922, to protect itself from being annexed by Detroit.
