Fort Clark and the War That Planted a City

The city of Peoria did not emerge smoothly. It was planted here by an army.

In October of eighteen twelve, Ninian Edwards, Territorial Governor of Illinois, led a military force to this part of the Illinois River. He believed, with limited evidence, that Native American villages near Peoria Lake were harboring warriors who had raided American settlements. His troops destroyed the villages. The following year, in eighteen thirteen, Brigadier General Benjamin Howard returned with a force of approximately fourteen hundred men, and they built a stockade on the west bank of the river. They called it Fort Clark, in honor of George Rogers Clark, the Revolutionary-era hero who had won the Northwest Territory for the United States in seventeen seventy-nine.

The fort was rudimentary, two rows of logs driven into the earth, the space between them packed with soil, forming walls. It was not designed to last. Native attacks came, were repelled, and in eighteen eighteen a fire, believed to have been set deliberately, destroyed most of what remained.

But the fort had done something the French settlements and the earlier stockades had not: it stuck. A civilian village grew up around Fort Clark almost immediately. Families arrived. A ferry service crossed the river. In eighteen twenty-five the settlement was renamed Peoria when the county was organized, it was incorporated as a town in eighteen thirty-five, and it was chartered as a city in eighteen forty-five. It became one of the fastest-growing cities in America in the decade that followed.

Peoria was, in its origins, a town that grew in the gap between a garrison's demolition and a city's founding. The gap was about fifteen years.