Madison
County Genealogical Society
Minutes of the Meeting – June 14, 2018
The June 2018 meeting of the Madison County
Genealogical Society was held at the Edwardsville Public Library on Thursday,
June 14, at 7:00 pm.
President, Robert Ridenour, called the meeting to order.
GIFT
MEMBERSHIPS AVAILABLE
Do you have a family member that is
interested in (or even obsessed with) genealogy? A membership in the Madison
County Genealogical Society would be a very thoughtful gift. A gift card will
be sent to the recipient of any gift membership.
The following memberships are available:
Individual/Family Annual Membership $25.00
Patron Annual Membership $35.00
Life Membership $300.00
Contact our Secretary, Petie Hunter, at petie8135@att.net,
about a gift membership.
June Meeting
On June 14, 2018, Jim DeGroff
presented a program titled The
Story of Hill’s Fort.
A fort like Hill’s Fort is easy to build if you know
how to build one, right? Many volunteers have been building it for the last 15
years. But I want to go back in time a little bit and tell you how Hill’s Fort
came into being.
In 1778, George Rogers Clark was told to go down the
Ohio River, go to Kaskaskia and go to Cahokia, and then go over to Vincennes
and take Fort Sackville from the British commander, Governor Hamilton. When
George Rogers Clark made that expedition with his 172 men and took that fort
from the British, that took care of everything, right?
We did not have to worry about the British, the Indians or anything, right? Maybe not.
Daniel Boone had his fort over in Boonesboro,
Kentucky. In 1778, at the same time that George Rogers Clark was going to
Vincennes, Daniel Boone’s daughter was captured by Blackfish
and his Shawnee Indians. Daniel Boone did not take too kindly to that.
He and some of his men went out and recaptured his daughter and killed many of
Blackfish’s warriors.
That did not set too well with Blackfish. He wanted to
get Daniel Boone. The next time Daniel Boone was out in the woods with his men,
Blackfish and a bunch of his Indians captured him. The British wanted the
Indians to attack Boonesboro. They needed to get rid of Boonesboro because it
was the biggest settlement in the western part of the country in 1778 (the
Kentucky Territory). So they captured Daniel Boone and were going to take him
to Boonesboro and make them surrender; then the Indians could take over the
fort.
Daniel Boone escaped and after he got back to
Boonesboro, they fortified up and started making bullets, etc. His daughter was
there. His wife had already left; she thought that Daniel Boone was dead. She
went back to North Carolina with the other children. His
daughter, Jemima, waited at the fort. She said, “Nope, Dad is still
alive and I’m going to wait.” She did and he got away from the Indians and got
all the way to Boonesboro. They say that he covered 120 miles in three days, on
foot. Think about that. That is amazing. Blackfish and his Indians attacked the
fort for nine days. The Indians lost half of their forces. They used fire
arrows against Boonsboro and it was in flames.
Daniel Boone had sent a man to Virginia, the nearest
outpost, to ask them for reinforcements. While Daniel Boone and his men were
defending a burning Boonesboro that night, there was a sudden rainstorm and the
flames in Boonesboro were extinguished (kind of like Washington, D.C., when it
was on fire during the War of 1812). Blackfish found out that a troop of
reinforcements was coming from Virginia. So he gave up, took off, and that was
the end of that, sort of.
The reinforcements came and they were under the
command of a guy named William Henry Harrison, who one day would be president.
He wanted to attack Blackfish’s home in Chillicothe, Ohio, where a large number
of Shawnee were. Daniel Boone refused to do it, and left Boonesboro with his
daughter and went back to North Carolina. All the men who were in Boonesboro
and all the new Virginia troops wanted to go attack Chillicothe. So they did.
(While this was going on, George Rogers Clark had taken Vincennes and defeated
the British.) The Boonesboro men and Virginia troops killed about 3,000 Shawnee
and they killed Blackfish in front of his adopted sons — an eight-year old and
an eleven-year old. They killed all these men, women, and children, except
these two kids. That was a big mistake on the part of Harrison.
The eleven-year old boy grew up to be Tecumseh and the
younger brother was Ten-skwat-awa, The Prophet. Tecumseh was the politician; he
was a conniver. He knew how to play the British against the Americans; and he
really wanted to make a consortium of all the Indians from Ohio, Indiana, and
Illinois: the Kickapoo, the Peekapoo, the Potawatomie, the Shawnee, the Fox,
and the Sauk — because the British offered them all of the Illinois Territory
for their hunting ground.
So, how does that transfer to Hill’s Fort? Well, in
Virginia — the Illinois Territory was part of Virginia — they gave surveyors the
task of coming to Kentucky and Illinois to survey the land. Isaac Hill was one
of those surveyors. Isaac Hill came with many other people; he came with Elias
Whitten, John Beck, Jeb Harris, John Hill, Henry Hill, Elijah and Isaac Hill,
and Joshua Renfro to this part of the country in the 1800s. They created this
map. The map shows the Kaskaskey [Kaskaskia] River, Hurricane Creek, St. Louis,
and Hill’s Fort. The map was drawn in 1803 and shows Hill’s Fort. So perhaps
the map was created in 1803 and then, later on, somebody put in Hill’s Fort.
The men came with all their families and built all
these forts as protection. There were about 94 forts and blockhouses in the
Illinois Territory, mostly in the southern part. We have records of where most
of the blockhouses and forts were — there were two in Greenville, three in
Edwardsville besides Fort Russell, there were two in Troy.
They had forts in all these different areas to protect
themselves from the Indians. The British never came here. When Fort Dearborn
surrendered, the people came out of the fort and after about two miles, they
were attacked by the Indians and were all killed, enslaved, or sold off to the
British. It was all Indians in Illinois. The Indians would never attack a fort.
So forts like Hill’s Fort were built.
Isaac Hill and several other surveyors with their
families came and used the forts as protection. They got their land and were
farming, but when there were signs of Indians, they all came to the forts. A
lot of the forts, like Hill’s Fort, were very large — it was 140 feet by 114
feet. It had a large cabin, a small cabin and a two-story blockhouse.
The Illinois Territorial Rangers that were stationed
at Fort Russell near Edwardsville would go out whenever there were signs of
Indians anywhere in the state. They had to go anywhere in the state. They were
in Edwardsville and if there were signs of Indians near present day Chicago,
they went. The population of the Illinois Territory was about 12,000 and it was
all in the southern part — along the Wabash, Ohio, Mississippi, and Illinois
Rivers. There were some people as far north as Peoria, but no further.
Ninian Edwards was the governor of the Illinois
Territory and he was in Edwardsville. So if something happened at Fort LaMotte
on the Wabash, or south like Golconda, or north like Peoria, the Rangers had to
go. Over the three year period from 1812 to 1815, there were maybe over a
hundred Rangers at Fort Russell and they could go anywhere in the Territory.
The Illinois Territory extended north to the Canadian border.
There was peace. The War of 1812 was just starting
against the British. So we did not have any worries here in Illinois, did we?
Just from Tecumseh and the Indians. The Winnebago Indians came down from the
area of what is Wisconsin today. They were part of Tecumseh’s group and got all
the way to Hill’s Fort in what is today Bond County. They did not attack the
fort. They attacked people who were defenseless — women and children. The
Lively Massacre occurred in today’s Washington County; there was a massacre
near Wood River, where a pregnant woman, Rachel Reagan, and six children from
three families were killed. Elijah Cox was killed near what is today Pocahontas
and his sister was kidnapped and taken to near Springfield. The Rangers were
able to track the Indian party and rescue the girl, because she tore pieces off
her clothing and dropped them as they travelled.
The Winnebago Indians came down to the original Hill’s
Fort area [near Exit 41 on I-70]. There was a water source over by the tree
line and that is where the Indians were hiding. We are not sure how many there
were, probably 30 to 80. On September 9, 1814, a group of 14 Rangers and
civilians went out because there had been reports of Indian signs in the area.
The group was ambushed, three Rangers and one civilian were killed, and several
others were wounded. There are memorial gravestones and markers to the fallen
near the site of the ambush.
Several of the wounded got back to the fort, but Tom
Higgins was in a battle for his life with three Indians. A woman in the fort,
Lydia Pursley, tried to get some of the men to go help Tom, but they would not.
So she grabbed her husband’s rifle, jumped on his horse, and rode out to help
Tom. Seeing this, several of the men, took out after her to help. Tom was saved
and lived for several years known as “Old Tom Higgins, the Indian Fighter.” (He
was about nineteen at the time of the battle.)
Hill’s Fort became the County Seat of Bond County when
the county was formed in 1817. The forts usually did not last too long — the
wood would rot away or be taken to be used for
something else. The location of Hill’s Fort was found by the
archaeology/anthropology department of Southern
Illinois University at Edwardsville using ground compaction surveys.
We built the replica of Hill’s Fort at the Farm Museum
because nobody would have come if we had built it out in the middle of a
cornfield. It is in Bond County just south of Greenville right across from the
buffalo farm, if you know where that is, right there at Illinois 127 and I-70,
Exit 45.
We tried to build it as it was described and the way
we think it was built. However, our method of building the stockade walls is
not the same as the original would have been. We put an anchor pole five feet
in the ground every 10-14 feet and fill in between them with poles sitting on
the surface of the ground. The poles between the anchors are tied to the anchor
poles by being bolted to cross members, and the bolts hidden by wooden plugs.
Our poles are made from old utility poles, so the danger of them rotting is not
very high.
In 2003, the State of Illinois tore down Fort Massac
in Metropolis because the wood used to build it had been treated with salt
water, which was not a historically accurate process. The timbers were donated
to the group wanting to build the replica of Hill’s Fort for the cost of
getting them hauled to the current location. Almost every piece of timber has
been used and is still solid.
Fort Massac was rebuilt by the State of Illinois for a
cost of several million dollars. Because of the type of material used, the
timbers quickly started to rot and the fort was soon condemned.
Every September, we have a Hill’s Fort Rendezvous; this
year it will be on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, September 14-16. Friday is
school day. There will be about three busloads of 5th graders
visiting the fort and, hopefully, learning some history. On Saturday and
Sunday, there will be demonstrations of cannon fire, rope making, bullet
making, candle making, a black powder shooting match, vendors, Rangers, and a
Fife and Drum Corps. So come out and join us for this event.
This presentation was very well received and
provoked many questions and comments.