Winter didn't stop Prohibition smugglers

When the Detroit River froze, they drove across or skated over with sleds. Wayne State archivists say 75% of the era's U.S.-bound smuggling crossed this "Windsor-Detroit Funnel." It bred gangs and violence.

Topics: Witching Hour

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Witching Hour is our nightly local history and folklore feature. Ghost stories and legends are retold as stories people tell, not reported as fact. Sources are listed below the story.

The Windsor-Detroit Funnel

During the Prohibition years, the narrow stretch of the Detroit River between Windsor and Detroit became one of the busiest smuggling corridors on the continent. Archivists at Wayne State's Walter P. Reuther Library call it the "Windsor-Detroit Funnel" and say about 75 percent of the era's U.S.-bound smuggling crossed there.

Michigan went dry on May 1, 1917, years before national Prohibition. Ontario's Temperance Act ran from 1916 to 1927, but export across the border remained legal under a 1922 county court ruling at Sandwich. That gap made the river a magnet for people moving goods south by boat in open water and by other means when winter closed in.

Across the ice

When the river froze, smugglers did not stop. Period accounts and later histories describe cars driven over the ice and people skating or dragging sleds from the Canadian shore to Michigan. The same corridor that made ordinary trade easy also made enforcement hard: short crossings, dense shoreline, and a ready market on the American side.

What it left behind

The Reuther Library notes that the Funnel trade helped breed organized gangs and a rise in violent crime on both sides of the river. Local memory of those winters still shows up in museum exhibits, oral history, and books on the period, including Philip P. Mason's Rumrunning and the Roaring Twenties and Marty Gervais's The Rumrunners: A Prohibition Scrapbook.