History

George Rogers Clark’s Illinois Campaign of 1778–1779 was one of the most consequential operations of the American Revolutionary War. Commanding a small force of Virginia militiamen, Clark marched from Kentucky across hundreds of miles of hostile wilderness and flooded river bottomland in the depths of winter to surprise the British garrison at Fort Sackville in Vincennes. He demanded the fort’s surrender, was refused, then demonstrated through tactical deception that his force was larger than it was — the British surrendered on February 25, 1779. Clark’s seizure of the Illinois country — Kaskaskia, Cahokia, Vincennes — helped secure American claims to the Northwest Territory in the Treaty of Paris (1783) and opened the Ohio Valley to American settlement.

Congress authorized a memorial at Vincennes in 1929, and construction began under the design of architect Frederick C. Hirons. The building is a rotunda form — a circle of Ionic columns supporting a shallow dome — but the detail is unmistakably of the Art Deco Moderne period: the ornamental program is abstract and geometric, the surfaces polished and regular, the proportions more horizontal than the classical rotunda formula typically permits. It was dedicated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on Independence Day, 1936, as part of a broader New Deal investment in commemorating the Revolutionary generation at symbolic sites across the country.

The bronze statue of Clark at the center was sculpted by Hermon A. MacNeil, who depicted Clark at the moment of the fort’s surrender — hand extended, gesturing the terms of the British capitulation. The seven interior mural panels, painted by artists working under the supervision of the National Park Service, document the campaign from departure to victory.