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Judging from contemporary accounts, Chicago founder Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, the Black trading post proprietor for whom local African American leaders propose renaming Lake Shore Drive, was a virtuous, cultured, likable, and good-looking man.
While there s little hard information available about DuSable s early life, according to tradition he was born in 1745 in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, now Haiti. By the late 1700s he was working as a trader in the Great Lakes region, and letters from other traders indicate that in 1779 he was living at the mouth of Trail Creek in present-day Michigan City, Indiana, a stone s throw from the current Shoreline Brewery location.