County of memorial: Knox County
Location of site: 401 2nd St. & US 50, Vincennes
Building built: 1931
Site of Fort Sackville
Erected by: United States
Land Donated by: The State of Indiana, the County of Knox and the City of Vincennes
"The memorial is placed at the believed site of Fort Sackville; no archeological evidence has shown the exact location, but it is undoubtedly within the park's boundaries. The episode being commemorated marked the finest moment in General George Rogers Clark's life. He was sent by the state of Virginia to protect its interest in the Old Northwest. His 1778-1779 campaign included the founding of Louisville, Kentucky and the capture of British forts in the lower Ohio and Mississippi valleys. Forces under Clark's command had captured Fort Sackville months before, but when notified that British forces under Henry Hamilton had retaken the fort, Clark led a desperate march to retake the fort again for the American cause, succeeding on February 25, 1779. This led to the newly formed United States claiming control of what would become the states of Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin in the 1783 Treaty of Paris.
"As Vincennes grew in the 1800s, it overran the site of Fort Sackville and its boundaries were lost. In 1905, the Daughters of the American Revolution placed a stone marker on what they believed was the location of the fort. In 1929, local residents made a major effort to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Clark's campaign. The state of Indiana chose to build a memorial to General Clark's triumph in the 1930s, with the assistance of the United States government; the various funds amounted to $2,500,000. The memorial was designed by New York architect Frederic Charles Hirons and dedicated June 14, 1936, by President Franklin Roosevelt. Though the National Park Service in 1976 called the finished memorial the "last major Classical style memorial" constructed in the United States, the New York State Memorial to Theodore Roosevelt at the American Museum of Natural History by John Russell Pope was also completed in 1936, and Pope's Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C. was completed 1939-1943, are of the same era.
"The memorial building is a circular granite structure surrounded by sixteen granite fluted Greek Doric columns in a peripteral colonnade, capped with a saucer dome of glass panels and resting on a stylobate. The north and east corners have restrooms and various maintenance rooms. Except for the maintenance rooms, these feature plastered walls and ceilings, marble wainscoting, and terrazzo flooring. Visitors enter the memorial by climbing thirty granite steps in the northwest corner. The basement is unfinished, with fluorescent lighting revealing a ceiling and walls of exposed concrete, and a dirt floor.
"Other prominent features in the park include John Angel's granite statue of Francis Vigo, a 4-by-9-foot (1.2 by 2.7 m) monument overlooking the Wabash River erected in 1934 that honors the Italian-American merchant who assisted General Clark. The adjacent grounds of the Basilica of St. Francis Xavier hold a 1934 bronze statue by Albin Polasek honoring Father Pierre Gibault, another figure in the Revolutionary War. Raoul Josset designed the Lincoln Memorial Bridge across the Wabash River to compliment the memorial aesthetically. It includes relief carvings designed by a monument by Nellie Walker on the Illinois side of the bridge and celebrates the migration of Abraham Lincoln. A concrete floodwall that protects the memorial and Vincennes from Wabash flooding is also designed in a complimentary Classical style. The grounds also hold a memorial to the soldiers from Knox County who served in World War I, a marker denoting where Clark's headquarters probably stood during his siege of Fort Sackville, and the original Daughters of the American Revolution memorial, which has moved several times due to construction of the main memorial." ~ Wikipedia