Dupo: A French Colonial Name on the Mississippi

Dupo sits on the east bank of the Mississippi River in Saint Clair County, Illinois, just south of East Saint Louis, and its name is the most compressed piece of French colonial geography in the region. Dupo is short for Prairie du Pont, French for Bridge Prairie, the name of the old French village settled by people who moved out of Cahokia. A settlement existed here as early as seventeen fifty as part of the Illinois Country network centered on nearby Kaskaskia and Prairie du Rocher.

Today Dupo is an industrial suburb with refineries and rail yards, and its French name is about all that remains of the colonial past. The area around it, though, is rich with the history of the old American Bottom, the floodplain that the Cahokia mound builders farmed for centuries before European contact.