 The village was incorporated as a city in 1877 and renamed Cadillac, after Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, sieur de Cadillac, a French colonist who started the first permanent settlement at Detroit in 1701.The Wexford County seat of government, originally located in Sherman, was moved to Manton in 1881, as the result of a compromise between the feuding residents of Cadillac and Sherman.Cadillac partisans, however, won the county seat by a county-wide vote in April 1882.