St. Francis Xavier Cathedral, Vincennes

The Cathedral of Saint Francis Xavier in Vincennes is not just a church. It is the oldest continuously operating Catholic parish in Indiana, and the ground beneath it holds more than two centuries of the American frontier.

When French traders established their post on the Wabash in the seventeen thirties, they did not come alone. Catholic missionaries came with them, and by seventeen thirty-four a small chapel dedicated to Saint Francis Xavier had been built here, serving the French colonists, fur traders, and the Native American communities around them. The settlement they built, called Post Saint Francis Xavier, was the first permanent European settlement in what would become Indiana.

That original chapel is long gone, but the Old French Cemetery adjacent to the cathedral holds the remains of the earliest settlers, with burial records dating to seventeen forty-one, making it one of the oldest documented burial grounds in the Midwest. The current cathedral building, a substantial brick structure in the Federal style, was begun in eighteen twenty-five and completed over the following years, rising on or very near the site of that original missionary chapel.

By then, Vincennes had already played an outsized role in American history. It had been the capital of Indiana Territory from eighteen hundred to eighteen thirteen, and Governor William Henry Harrison had governed the territory from a house still standing a few blocks away. The town had seen French, British, and American flags fly over its fort. It had been the prize that George Rogers Clark marched one hundred eighty miles through flooded prairie to capture in seventeen seventy-nine.

Through all of that, the parish continued. The cathedral was elevated to basilica status in nineteen seventy, one of the earliest basilicas in the Midwest. The library attached to it holds rare French colonial documents. Walking in here is walking into the layered history of the continent, from the first French missionaries to the American republic.