The Lafferty Family
Pioneers Of the Downriver Area
by Frank Rathbun, November 6, 1952
Courtesy of The News Herald (originally published in The Mellus Newspapers)
IN THE turbulent years immediately preceding the Revolutionary War, a venturesome Frenchman arrived in the important fur-trading post at Fort Detroit and set up a tailor shop.
Born sometime in the 1740's Louis Vesseire dit Laferte came probably from Montreal, as did many French-Canadian settlers of early Detroit.
Old records relate that his first wife and several children died in one of the epidemics which frequently swept the scattered frontier communities.
This early Detroit tailor, who dropped the original French surname, Vessiere, in favor of the New World nickname, Laferte, subsequently was married to Catherine Esprit dit Champagne and became the ancestor of many of the Lafferty families who reside today in the Downriver-Detroit area.
Louis Laferte, who died in 1811, and his second wife, had eight children, born between 1772 and 1788, who lived to maturity. The children included:
Louis, junior, who married Catherine Campau; Alexis , married Marie Pageot; Antoine, married Felice Bourassa; Joseph, married Marie Gouyou; Pierre, or Peter, who married Marie LaFoy, and three daughters; Catherine, Angelique and Marie, who married Joseph Navarre.
JOSEPH LAFFERTY (1780-1826) had several children, including a daughter, Petronella, and two sons, Alexander and Clement. Clement Lafferty (1820-1899), who married Cecile Beaubien, lived on Fort Street near Twelth, in Detroit, and owned a strip of land extending from the river to Grand River Avenue.
Peter Lafferty (1788-1833), moved at an early date to the community of Ecorse and is the ancestor of most Downriver Lafferty families.
Peter and his wife, Marie (LaFoy) Lafferty, died about the same time, leaving four minor children, Peter, junior, Leon, Mary and Justine.
Peter Lafferty, Jr., married Sophia Dufault and had seven children, including Sylvester, Richard, Grant, Eleanor, Louise, Mary and Maude. Leon Lafferty, his brother, was sent to live with an uncle after his parent's death. Finding himself forced to work long hours with little kindness on the part of his relatives, Lafferty ran away to Canada where he remained for some years.
Returning to the United States in the 1850's, Leon Lafferty married Zoey Durocher and purchased a farm in what is now Lincoln Park, in the vicinity of Lincoln street.
HIS OLD homestead, enlarged and remodeled, is still standing on the southwest corner of Lincoln and River Drive, possibly the oldest existing home in the city.
Still surrounded by the traditional picket fence, with an ancient barn behind the house and a small orchard in the yard, the homesite today looks much as it must have looked when first built nearly a century ago.
Leon Lafferty's oldest living son, Daniel J. Lafferty, of Allen Park, recalls that his father paid only a few thousand dollars for some fifty-acres of land stretching west from the river along Lincoln Street to present-day Fort Park.
BY THE time of his father's death in 1898, only ten-acres of the land were cleared, according to Lafferty. The elderly villager also recalls that his father, at the age of 43, was drafted for military service near the close of the Civil War and was ready to leave for the Army when Lee surrendered.
In addition to Daniel J., the elder Lafferty's twelve children included, Josephine, Alexander, Rose, Peter, Mary, Elisabeth, Frances Xavier, Victoire, Mildred, Lillian and Eugene.
Frank X. Lafferty (1872-1937) operated a meat and grocery business in Ecorse until his death, while serving Ecorse Township in many elective offices.
HE ENTERED the political field in 1904, when elected for village treasurer for two years. In 1912 he was named township treasurer and upon relinquishing that post in 1914, became supervisor of Ecorse Township for two years.
In 1915 he was also elected as a trustee, or village councilman, a position he held off and on for almost 15 years.
Lafferty was re-elected township supervisor in 1929, holding the job until several years before his death.
Frank X. Lafferty and his wife, Lucille Willoughby, had several children, including Charles, Daniel, F. Barrett, a recent Lincoln Park businessman, and Mrs. Marcella Babel, of Ecorse an elementary school principal in Detroit.
Downriver and Detroit directories show that the pioneer Detroit tailor, Louis Lafferty, today has hundreds of descendant's residing in the area which he pioneered nearly two centuries ago.
