This year is the 350th anniversary of the first French military explorations of the Illinois Country.
For Northern Illinois University archaeologist Dana Bardolph, it's also an ideal time to explore French settlement in Peoria. Fort Crevecoeur was the first public building established by Europeans in the modern state of Illinois when it was erected in 1680, several years after the initial French incursions.
While the exact site of that fabled first fort remains hazy, colonial-era maps provide more surety on later structures.
"We have documents that indicate that in downtown Peoria, along the riverfront downtown, there was at least one fort there, or at least one Jesuit mission, a number of trading posts, and of course, the residential neighborhoods, as well as the the villages of the Illinois Indians," said Bardolph.
The development of modern downtown Peoria has disturbed the remains of many of those original settlements, but there's still hope that more can be learned about these first European settlers.
"We can use things like Sanborn fire insurance maps that show us where structures from the turn of the century were located, and then also open areas that have currently not been developed over currently. So open kind of grassy park areas," she said. "We may have settlements intact, even in some folks' backyards."
Teams are currently out conducting remote sensing surveys of the ground around Peoria's Liberty Park, searching for subsurface anomalies that may signify the prime areas for further exploration.
"We do have these little, little pockets, these sort of patches of areas that haven't been developed. And those are the areas that we're targeting," she said.
Bardolph said she's interested in the dynamics between the French settlers in the region and the Native American tribes in the area. But for now, the main goal is to establish a baseline for future archaeological digs in an area of Peoria that's only seen limited investigations to date.
