Little Egypt Heritage Articles Stories of Southern Illinois Bill Oliver 6 October 2002 Vol 1 Issue: #6 ISSN: pending Good Evening Ladies and Gentlemen, I like to think of myself as a historian ... a family historian. It is important to know that I am human as everyone of my ancestors. Some of them may have been strange, but none were alien. :) So know all ye, that I can be no harder on my forbears than I could be on myself. Therefore, I look at history as I might live it. And, that is a lot of fun. Many of my Illinois ancestors probably stopped in Massac County, or at least passed through it. So this week I have become the County Coordinator for the Massac County ILGenWeb Project. This means, among other things, that I get to build a web site that will hopefully help researchers looking for information about that Illinois county. The county was named for the fort located there. It is an ancient site, predating the French who built the fort. About two miles south and east of Unionville, are the ancient mounds called Kincaid Mounds. There are ten of them, each about 30 feet high and with bases of up to 200 feet by 300 feet. They are the earliest discovered culture in Massac County from Indian Knoll culture to Mississippian period. Fort Massac, as mentioned, was built by the French. They abandoned it after the French and Indian War. Due to it being a symbol of the Euro-American, the Cherokee destroyed it. President George Washington ordered it rebuilt. Anthony Wayne, of the Battle of Fallen Timbers in northwestern Ohio, and Zebulon M Pike, father of the Zebulon Pike of the discovery of Pike's Peak in Colorado, were given the task to rebuild it. The Fort also played parts in events prior to the War of 1812. Aaron Burr, the vice-president under Thomas Jefferson, stopped at the Fort for a few days in June 1805 to confer with James Wilkenson, one of the Forts officers. This was part of a plot to separate the western United States from the original thirteen colonies. The plot included setting himself up as King Burr and protected by Spain. This is disputed, that instead he was planning to conquer Mexico. Fact: he was massing men, flatboats, supplies, and provisions on the Cumberland Island, which is near present day Golconda. Well, Burr was arrested and tried for treason, as most of us know. The novel, The Man Without a Country, written by Edward Everett Hale used this situation as basis for its plot. Mr. Hale's choice of a situation as the nucleus for a story was a great success and had only been adopted by one other person some twenty years before [by Hawthorne, with very different material and for a very different purpose]. I had better revise "novel" for I believe it is classified as a "short story". The Fort really took a beating from the New Madrid earthquake and abandoned shortly after the War of 1812. One of Massac county's residents of the late 1850s and early 1860s, was one of my ancestors who experienced that earthquake. In the words of a cousin of mine, our ".... family lost almost everything they owned in that quake and after shocks. They suffered through the earthquake and then came the War of 1812. In 1813 they were in Caldwell Co., KY. having made their way up the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, in their covered wagon and what they had left." The movie film, U.S. Marshals, with Tommy Lee Jones was partially filmed in the wooded Mermet swampland near Metropolis. Also the Irvin S Cobb Bridge at Brookport, the Massac Memorial Hospital, and a Truck Stop in the county were featured. The same cousin mentioned above relates this family story about the filming of that movie: "When Tommy Lee Jones was making that movie ... he hurt his hand (for real) and saw a doctor in Paducah. Our youngest daughter was in the medical building and ran into him in a corridor. She said she thought 'that man looks just like Tommy Lee Jones.' She said he was very pleasant looking and smiled in her direction. She was thinking Tommy Lee Jones has a double living in Paducah. Later when watching the local news she learned she had seen Tommy Lee and not his double." The mounds mentioned earlier may have part of the daily lives of ancestors of the Shawnee and Cherokee peoples. The cottonmouth snake, a swamp dweller measuring a half inch short of 50 inches was killed at Mermet Lake. The lake taking its name from Father Mermet, a Jesuit priest, who ministered to the Indians in 1791 when Fort Massac was known as Fort Assumption. New Columbia took its name from the Columbine flower and was settled in the 1840s. Since Monroe county had a town so named the word "new" was added to avoid confusion. There is a town Joppa down river from Metropolis who had a line of the Burlington RR ending there. And, a village was named for L. D. Hillerman in 1835. And, because of its name, the town of Metropolis has become the hometown of the super hero, Superman. A giant statue guards the entrance to the county courthouse and is across the square from the Super[man] Museum. Wado, Bill -- Notes: 1. Little Egypt Heritage articles will be posted on Sunday evening on the SOIL-L@rootsweb.com ILJackso-L@rootsweb.com ILJohnso-L@rootsweb.com ILMassac-L@rootsweb.com . To subscribe: Clicking on one of the shortcut links below should work, but if your browser doesn't understand them, try these manual instructions: to join ILMassac, send mail to ILMassac-L-request@rootsweb.com with the single word subscribe in the message subject and body. To join ILMassac-D, do the same thing with ILMassac-D-request@rootsweb.com. Subscribe to ILMassac-L Subscribe to ILMassac-D (digest)