A History of Flint, Michigan (as told by my father)
My father, Jerry Dee Prior, shared many stories of how his ancestors came to settle in Michigan and of his time growing up in Flint, Michigan. This account covers before, during, and after The Great Depression, and until he joined the Navy to become a bomber pilot in 1942. The following information is as he wrote and told it when he was eighty years old, with pictures and additional text that I added to provide detail and historical perspective.
The story begins around 1870, when my great-grandfather and great-grandmother on my mother’s side came from England and settled on Long Island, New York. They farmed 40 acres but were unsuccessful, so they sold the farm for forty barrels of salt and moved to St. Charles, Michigan.
In 1872, my grandfather on my father’s side, Joseph Prior, immigrated to Canada from Germany. That winter, the Saint Mary’s River froze over, and he walked across to St. Clair, Michigan. He then migrated to Bay City, Michigan, and worked as a teamster hauling ice off Saginaw Bay for the ice houses. The next year, he married my grandmother, Francis Brohn, and they had thirteen children with a twenty-five-year age difference, and the youngest was my father, Godfried (Fred) Prior.
In 1919, my father married my mother, Anna (Annie Dee) Duncan, and settled in the town of Flint, Michigan. Dr. Orr, who drove a Model T Ford, delivered me at the house in Flint on April 22, 1923, for a fee of five dollars. My parents named me Jerry Dee Prior…
