Massac County is a county in the U.S. state of Illinois. According to the 2020 census, it had a population of 14,169. Established in 1843 and named for a French fort founded in the 18th century, its county seat is Metropolis. Massac County is included in the Paducah, KY-IL Micropolitan Statistical Area. It is located along the Ohio River, in the portion of the state known locally as "Little Egypt".
Cave-In-Rock is a village in Hardin County, Illinois, United States. Its principal feature and tourist attraction is nearby Cave-In-Rock, on the banks of the Ohio River. In 1816, the earliest known permanent white settlers arrived and started building a town near the cave. The town was originally known as Rock and Cave, Illinois, with a post office under this name. On October 24, 1849, the town was officially renamed Cave-In-Rock. Cave-In-Rock was incorporated as a village in 1901. The population was 318 at the 2010 census.
Metropolis is a city located along the Ohio River in Massac County, Illinois, United States. It has a population of 6,537 according to the 2010 United States Census. Metropolis is the county seat of Massac County and is part of the Paducah, KY-IL Micropolitan Statistical Area in Southern Illinois.
Prairie du Rocher is a village in Randolph County, Illinois, United States. Founded in the French colonial period in the American Midwest, the community is located near bluffs that flank the east side of the Mississippi River along the floodplain often called the "American Bottom". The population was 502 at the 2020 census.
The Arkansas Post, formally the Arkansas Post National Memorial, was the first European settlement in the Mississippi Alluvial Plain and present-day U.S. state of Arkansas. In 1686, Henri de Tonti established it on behalf of Louis XIV of France for the purpose of trading with the Quapaw Nation. The French, Spanish, and Americans, who acquired the territory in 1803 with the Louisiana Purchase, considered the site of strategic value. It was the capital of Arkansas from 1819 until 1821 when the territorial government relocated to Little Rock.
The Corps of Discovery was a specially established unit of the United States Army which formed the nucleus of the Lewis and Clark Expedition that took place between May 1804 and September 1806. The Corps was led jointly by Captain Meriwether Lewis and Second Lieutenant William Clark. Commissioned by President Thomas Jefferson, the Corps' objectives were scientific and commercial – to study the area's plants, animal life, and geography, and to learn how the Louisiana Purchase could be exploited economically. Aside from its military composition, the Corps' additional personnel included scouts, boatmen, and civilians.
Fort Michilimackinac was an 18th-century French, and later British, fort and trading post at the Straits of Mackinac; it was built on the northern tip of the lower peninsula of the present-day state of Michigan in the United States. Built around 1715, and abandoned in 1783, it was located along the Straits, which connect Lake Huron and Lake Michigan of the Great Lakes of North America.
George Rogers Clark was an American military officer and surveyor from Virginia who became the highest-ranking Patriot military officer on the northwestern frontier during the Revolutionary War. He served as leader of the Virginia militia in Kentucky throughout much of the war. He is best known for his captures of Kaskaskia in 1778 and Vincennes in 1779 during the Illinois campaign, which greatly weakened British influence in the Northwest Territory and earned Clark the nickname of "Conqueror of the Old Northwest". The British ceded the entire Northwest Territory to the United States in the 1783 Treaty of Paris.
Henry Hamilton was an Anglo-Irish military officer and later government official of the British Empire. He served in North America as Lieutenant Governor of the Province of Quebec and later as Deputy Governor after the American Revolutionary War. He later served as Governor of Bermuda and lastly, as Governor of Dominica, where he died in office.
Fort Clatsop was the encampment of the Lewis and Clark Expedition in the Oregon Country near the mouth of the Columbia River during the winter of 1805–1806. Located along the Lewis and Clark River at the north end of the Clatsop Plains approximately 5 miles (8.0 km) southwest of Astoria, the fort was the last encampment of the Corps of Discovery, before embarking on their return trip east to St. Louis.
Fort Ouiatenon, built in 1717, was the first fortified European settlement in what is now Indiana, United States. It was a palisade stockade with log blockhouse used as a French trading post on the Wabash River located approximately three miles southwest of modern-day West Lafayette. The name 'Ouiatenon' is a French rendering of the name in the Wea language, waayaahtanonki, meaning 'place of the whirlpool'. It was one of three French forts built during the 18th century in what was then New France, later the Northwest Territory and today the state of Indiana, the other two being Fort Miami and Fort Vincennes. A substantial French settlement grew up around the fort in the mid-18th century. It was ceded to the British and abandoned after the French and Indian war. Later, it passed into Indian hands and was destroyed in 1791 by American militia during the Northwest Indian War. It was never a U.S. fort. The original site was rediscovered in the 1960s; the archaeological site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1970, and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2021.
Fort de Chartres was a French fortification first built in 1720 on the east bank of the Mississippi River in present-day Illinois. It was used as the administrative center for the province, which was part of New France. Due generally to river floods, the fort was rebuilt twice, the last time in limestone in the 1750s in the era of French colonial control over Louisiana and the Illinois Country.
The Illinois Historic Preservation Division, formerly Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, is a governmental agency of the U.S. state of Illinois, and is a division of the Illinois Department of Natural Resources. It is tasked with the duty of maintaining State-owned historic sites, and maximizing their educational and recreational value to visitors or on-line users. In addition, it manages the process for applications within the state for additions to the National Register of Historic Places.
Fort Kaskaskia State Historic Site is a 200-acre (0.8 km²) park near Chester, Illinois, on a blufftop overlooking the Mississippi River. It commemorates the vanished frontier town of Old Kaskaskia and the support it gave to George Rogers Clark in the American Revolution.
During the 18th and early 19th centuries, the French, British and U.S. forces built and occupied a number of forts at Vincennes, Indiana. These outposts commanded a strategic position on the Wabash River. The names of the installations were changed by the various ruling parties, and the forts were considered strategic in the French and Indian War, the American Revolutionary War, the Northwest Indian War and the War of 1812. The last fort was abandoned in 1816.
Samuel Ross Mason, also spelled Meason, was a Virginia militia captain, on the American western frontier, during the American Revolutionary War. After the war, he became the leader of the Mason Gang, a criminal gang of river pirates and highwaymen on the lower Ohio River and the Mississippi River in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. He was associated with outlaws around Red Banks, Cave-in-Rock, Stack Island, and the Natchez Trace.
The Tellico Blockhouse was an early American outpost located along the Little Tennessee River in what developed as Vonore, Monroe County, Tennessee. Completed in 1794, the blockhouse was a US military outpost that operated until 1807; the garrison was intended to keep peace between the nearby Overhill Cherokee towns and encroaching early Euro-American pioneers in the area in the wake of the Cherokee–American wars.
John Duff, born John McElduff, or John Michael McElduff, because early court records referred to him as John Michael Duff, was a counterfeiter, criminal gang leader, horse thief, cattle thief, hog thief, salt maker, longhunter, scout, and soldier who assisted in George Rogers Clark's campaign to capture the Illinois country for the American rebel side during the Revolutionary War.
Mission Nuestra Señora del Espíritu Santo de Zúñiga, also known as Aranama Mission or Mission La Bahía, was a Roman Catholic mission established by Spain in 1722 in the Viceroyality of New Spain—to convert native Karankawa Indians to Christianity. Together with its nearby military fortress, Presidio La Bahía, the mission upheld Spanish territorial claims in the New World against encroachment from France. The third and final location near Goliad, Texas is maintained now as part of Goliad State Park and Historic Site
Fort Juelson, designated 21OT198 in the state archaeological inventory, is a historic site located east of Underwood, Minnesota, United States. An earthen fort was built at this hilltop in July 1876 after rumors of Indian attacks in Foxhome, French, and Fergus Falls following the Battle of Little Bighorn in Montana. Many settlers left the area. Charles A. Dollner, a local merchant, suggested the rest of the people band together and build the fortification under leadership of two American Civil War veterans, Hans Juelson and Berge O. Lee. The scare proved to be a hoax, and the fort was never used for defensive purposes. Remnants of the sod barricade are still on the site.
