Around 1825, a major migration westward toward Michigan and other midwestern regions started from the northeastern population centers of the United States. New York and New England farmers, exhausted from working small, rocky, infertile plots, were drawn by word of a rich new frontier. Midwestern regions such as Michigan, which had so recently been frontier, were linked almost overnight to the centers of American commerce. In 1825 the Erie Canal, constructed between Lake Erie and the Hudson River in the state of New York, was completed. It connected the east with what Americans rather innocently thought was the west and caused a dramatic drop in shipping rates. Before the canal, it had cost almost 20 cents a mile to ship a ton of freight overland from Buffalo, New York, to New York City; with the new waterway it was soon less than a penny a mile. The midwestern farm, with access to Buffalo by way of Lake Erie, now served the eastern consumer; the Michigan mine supplied the eastern manufacturer. The effect on Detroit, Michigan, was stunning. It became the hub of a region selling tobacco and flour and salted fish to people some 700 miles away. The effect on New York City, joined to the canal by the Hudson River, was equally important. It soon surpassed Boston, Massachusetts, as a center of commerce.
In the 1830s, there were 599,000 new immigrants to the United States, in the 1840s 1.7 million, and in the 1850s 2.6 million. Detroit was one focus of the influx; its population, 9,000 in 1820, would be well over 200,000 by the end of the century. The city was well placed to benefit from the continuing westward expansion. The surrounding area was rich in timber to satisfy the demand for wood to build horse-drawn carriages, railroad cars, and railroad ties for the expanding network of track. The mines to the north produced iron and copper for building a variety of machines.
Michigan's early industries, those that developed in the nineteenth century, drew people with particular skills that evolved into the skills required in the early twentieth century. The carriage makers, for example, became the automakers; the stove makers became the metalworkers in the automotive body and engine shops; the leather workers who did the upholstery for carriages eventually made seat covers for cars.