Dieppe
First recorded as a small fishing settlement in 1030, Dieppe was an important prize fought over during the Hundred Years' War.
Dieppe housed the most advanced French school of cartography in the 16th century. Two of France's best navigators, Michel le Vasseur and his brother Thomas le Vasseur, lived in Dieppe when they were recruited to join the expedition of René Goulaine de Laudonnière which departed Le Havre for Florida on April 20, 1564. The expedition resulted in the construction of Fort Caroline, the first French colony in the New World. Another expedition two years before where Goulaine de Laudonnière was under command of Jean Ribault, a local Huguenot captain, had resulted in the foundation of Charlesfort, now in South Carolina. Dieppe was the premier port of the kingdom in the 17th century.
On July 23, 1632, 300 colonists heading to New France departed from Dieppe.
At the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, Dieppe lost 3,000 of its Huguenot citizens, who fled abroad.
City of Paris Dry Goods Co.
The store's history is rooted in the 1849 California Gold Rush. The company was founded by Felix and Emile Verdier in May 1850 when Emile arrived in the San Francisco Harbor on a chartered ship, the "Ville de Paris" (City of Paris), loaded with silks, laces, fine wines, champagne, and Cognac. Verdier brothers had previously owned a silk-stocking manufacturer in Nîmes and Paris in France. The citizens of San Francisco quickly surrounded the ship with rowboats and purchased all the goods without them ever being unloaded from the ship. Many purchases were made with bags of gold dust. Emile Verdier quickly returned to France and loaded the ship bound for San Francisco arriving in 1851, where he opened a small waterfront store at 152 Kearney Street called the City of Paris. The store's Latin motto ("Fluctuat nec mergitur", "It floats and never sinks") was borrowed from the city seal of Paris.