Kaskaskia

The story

Kaskaskia was once the most important town in the Illinois country. Founded around 1703 as a French Jesuit mission and fur-trading center on the Mississippi, it grew into a wheat-shipping town of several thousand, the largest settlement in the region. It became the capital of the Illinois Territory in 1809 and then, in 1818, the first capital of the new state of Illinois — until the seat of government moved to Vandalia in 1820.

Then the river turned on it. The Mississippi had always run to the west of town, with the smaller Kaskaskia River to the east; in the catastrophic flood of 1881 the big river jumped its banks and carved a new channel straight down the bed of the Kaskaskia. When the water settled, the Mississippi ran east of the town, and Kaskaskia found itself cut off from the rest of Illinois — an island, and then effectively part of the Missouri shore. The original townsite washed away over the following decades.

What survives is a village of about two dozen people on the west bank, the only piece of Illinois west of the Mississippi. Its treasure is the Kaskaskia Bell — the 'Liberty Bell of the West,' cast in France in 1741 and given to the mission by Louis XV — housed in a brick shrine beside the Church of the Immaculate Conception.

What remains today

The Kaskaskia Bell in its brick shrine, the Church of the Immaculate Conception, and a handful of homes on the Illinois enclave west of the Mississippi.