Kolmer Site

About this property

The Kolmer Site is an archaeological site in the far southwest of the U.S. state of Illinois. Located near Kaskaskia and Prairie du Rocher in western Randolph County, it lies at the site of an early historic Indian village from the French period. Because it occupies a critical chronological and cultural position, it has been given national recognition as a historic site. Under René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers were discovered and explored for the first time, and claimed as part of New France. The earliest explorers were followed by Catholic Christian missionaries led by Jacques Gravier, who soon won converts among the Illini, and some of these praying Indians founded riverside villages at Cahokia, Kaskaskia, and Peoria. These villages were small by modern standards, although they remained comparable in size to European settlements in the area; according to letters by one missionary written in 1750, three Illini villages in the American Bottom together numbered fewer than eight hundred inhabitants, while the five French villages in the same region comprised eleven hundred Frenchmen and three hundred blacks. Established in 1720, the village at the present Kolmer Site was inhabited by a subgroup of the Illini known as the Michigamea. Here the flickering light of civilization grew for little more than thirty years before it was unexpectedly snuffed out: in 1752, a confederation of the Fox, Sioux, and Cherokees came up against the village suddenly, and although it had been fortified with a stockade, the inhabitants were unable to hold off the invaders. Many were savagely killed, and numerous others were captured, and the survivors fled to Kaskaskia. The invaders withdrew, but only after burning the abandoned village; instead of rebuilding their destroyed homes, the Michigamea established a new village nearby at a location known to modern archaeologists as the Waterman Site. French dominion in the American Bottom ended with the Treaty of Paris in 1763, by which all lands east of the Mississippi were ceded to the Kingdom of Great Britain. British dominion, in turn, was ended by the American Revolution: while the French settlers and local Indians were initially favorable toward the British, skillful manoeuvering by George Rogers Clark won the support of both populations for the Americans. The influence of the Catholic faith may have waned by this time, as Clark addressed the inhabitants of Kaskaskia and Cahokia using traditional religious terms instead of Christian words, and by the early nineteenth century Kaskaskia was home to numerous Protestant churches, such as the Episcopalians, the Baptists, and the Reformed Presbyterians. Nevertheless, the Kolmer residents' church endured: the parish of the Immaculate Conception in Kaskaskia survived the great nineteenth-century flood that saw the Mississippi abandon its banks and leave Kaskaskia an island on the western side of the river, and although the village had fallen to a population of fourteen by the time of the 2010 census, Mass is still celebrated at the church weekly.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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