George Rogers Clark and the English Hotel Facade

This carved figure of George Rogers Clark once looked out from the facade of the English Hotel and Opera House, a grand Victorian pile that stood on Monument Circle in downtown Indianapolis from eighteen eighty until it was torn down in the late nineteen forties. When the wrecking crews came, salvaged pieces of its stonework were carried off and preserved, which is how this sculpture ended up here, far from the Circle where it began.

Clark was worth carving. In the winter of seventeen seventy-nine, during the Revolution, he led a small force on a brutal march through flooded Illinois country and surprised the British garrison at Vincennes. His capture of that fort helped secure the whole Northwest for the young United States. William English, who built the hotel, even wrote a history of Clark's campaigns.