Clarksville: First American Town in Indiana

Clarksville holds a distinction most Indiana towns cannot claim: it was the first American town laid out in what became Indiana. In seventeen eighty-three, the Virginia legislature granted General George Rogers Clark and his Revolutionary War soldiers one hundred fifty thousand acres at the Falls of the Ohio, as payment for their wartime service. Clark and two fellow commissioners laid out the town of Clarksville in the spring of seventeen eighty-four.

By year's end, twenty or thirty families had moved in. Clark himself built a grist mill on a creek through town and lived here in a two-room cabin from eighteen oh three to eighteen oh nine. The man who had secured the Northwest for the young United States spent his final active years overlooking the river he had helped open.