Fort Sinquefield

Nestled near what is now Grove Hill, the historic grounds of Fort Sinquefield mark the location where a wooden stockade once stood in Clarke County, Alabama. Settlers who arrived early in the region raised the structure for defense during the Creek War, and Creek warriors launched an assault against it in 1813. Schoolchildren from Clarke County placed a marker at the location in 1931, and the site earned a spot on the National Register of Historic Places on December 31, 1974.

History

Clarke County had only recently been established within the Mississippi Territory when the Creek War erupted, a conflict that began as an internal struggle among the Creek people themselves. This division split the nation into two camps: traditionalist Creek living in the Upper Towns and those in the Lower Towns who had embraced European-American ways of life. Disputes among town chiefs over the handling of shared lands and related matters fueled this internal rift. American forces first became entangled in this conflict close to this area, when Mississippi Territory militia struck the Red Sticks at Burnt Corn on July 27, 1813.

Retaliation followed swiftly. On August 30 of that same year, Red Stick fighters descended upon Fort Mims, which was defended by Tensaw Creek inhabitants whom the Red Sticks viewed as having betrayed fundamental Creek principles. Inside the fort's walls, several hundred people had gathered, including Lower Town Creek, whites who had married into Creek families, enslaved people, and various settlers. Nearly all of them perished in the slaughter that history would remember as the Fort Mims massacre.

In the aftermath, pioneer families along with sympathetic Lower Creek sought protection at Fort Sinquefield. Then, on September 1, 1813, warriors under Josiah Francis, known also as Hillis Hadjo or Francis the Prophet, struck the Ransom Kimbell and Abner James households, who had ventured from the overcrowded fort to Kimbell's nearby cabin. While most of the men managed to flee back to the safety of the fort, twelve women and children lost their lives, scalped in what became known afterward as the Kimbell-James Massacre. Their remains were recovered and given burial just outside the fort's grounds the following day.

That same day brought a second assault. This time the Red Sticks targeted women who had gone to wash clothes at a spring some distance from the fort's protection. The warriors tried to sever the women's path back to safety, a plan undone when settlers turned loose sixty dogs kept within the fort. One woman, Sarah Phillips, fell to the Creek attackers, though the remaining settlers reached the fort and began firing on their assailants from within. The fighting claimed several Red Stick warriors along with the settler Stephen Lacey among its casualties. After roughly two hours of combat, the Red Sticks withdrew. Not long afterward, those who had survived left Sinquefield behind entirely, relocating several miles south to the more substantial Fort Madison.