On a warm day in 1973, my wife and I packed our one-year-old into her stroller and headed for the neighborhood Tastee-Freez, a dozen blocks northeast of downtown Peoria. We walked past houses and small businesses that had seen better days, and as we looked downhill across the one-way streets we could glimpse sailboats and barges on Peoria Lake, actually a wide place in the Illinois River. Then we stood on the corner at the Tastee-Freez, chatting over the traffic noise while our daughter lathered herself with ice cream.
The archaeologists weren’t there as part of any plan to find the French village. They were there because the Illinois Department of Transportation was relocating a section of Adams Street to accommodate the nearby O’Brien Steel Company. State law provides funding to seek out and save archaeological evidence in such cases, before construction destroys it forever. The money for this “salvage” work comes from IDOT; the work is done by the Illinois Transportation Archaeological Research Program (ITARP), headed by Thomas Emerson of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The stain marked the top of what had been a continuous trench about two feet deep. What had it been? The simplest and most plausible answer was an old fence line. The fence would have been constructed by inserting wooden poles into the earth, making a solid wall of upright stakes to protect crops from free-ranging animals. The wood is long gone, but the signs of disturbance remain.
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Two months later Mazrim and Nolan returned for another week of work and found even better evidence that the French had been present. In a vacant lot about half a block northeast of the first, they scraped off the topsoil and promptly found another faint stain in the subsoil. “It was a little creepy,” says Mazrim, “hitting something right away.” Instead of running straight, however, this stain turned one corner, then another. It marked the “wall trench” for a two-room cabin with, most likely, a porch running along one side–a shape typical of French cabins. “We spent all day November 8 hand troweling, and finally stood back and saw a beautiful rectangle–a room. That was a good day.”
Finding so few artifacts around a dwelling, in ground that hasn’t been disturbed for 200 years, is like finding the Loop deserted at lunchtime: something’s wrong, but you don’t know what. Mazrim says that in the larger French agricultural settlements near present-day Saint Louis, known as the American Bottom, “We’d have found a tableful of pretty artifacts for you to look at.” Either nobody stayed in the cabin very long, or all of their household goods were leather and wood and have long since rotted. No doubt this was French Peoria at last, but where was everything?
The third French Peoria is the one Mazrim and Nolan found an edge of. Generally known as the Old Fort and Village, it dates from roughly 1750 to 1796, though our knowledge of its origin and abandonment is pretty vague. In 1750 a French fur trader named Descaris built some sort of fort on the west side of Peoria Lake near its north end, probably a few blocks north of where Mazrim and Nolan dug. He built it at the request of the Peoria Indians, who at that time had a village of 1,200 people next to the lake. (Descaris may well be an example of how fluid identity was on the midwestern frontier. A few years later, in what we now call Wisconsin, a man of the same name married a Winnebago woman and became a tribal leader.)
It’s hard to say what kind of place the New Village was–everyone who wrote down anything about it was either somewhere else or off to somewhere else at the time. A visitor in 1779 said it had “narrow, unpaved streets, and houses constructed of wood.” In 1790 Lieutenant John Armstrong’s expedition recorded it as “a French trading Place.” The Illinois territorial governor at the time, Arthur Saint Clair, called it “a small village…where there are five or six French families.” Yet Maillet is said to have traveled from this humble village (with Gomo) to visit President Washington during the 1790s, and in 1806 an American, Thomas Forsyth, set up trading operations in it.
