Lincoln Memorial Bridge

From earliest times the Wabash River served as a route between North and South, and at this fording place it was crossed by a Buffalo Trace, an ancient path worn by countless animals and aborigines in their migrations between East and West. Near this meeting of ancient ways, moundbuilders left vestiges of a remote past, and in historic times Indians lived and traveled by both land and water routes as French explorers and missionaries followed. Early in the eighteenth century Vincennes, the oldest settlement in this region, was established, and after England won the region from France, the British commander in the Northwest came down the Wabash and made Fort Sackville at this crossing of ways the key to the frontier during the War of the Revolution. George Rogers Clark and his troops then followed the Buffalo Trace from Kaskaskia toward Vincennes and captured Fort Sackville. By this route also came William Henry Harrison, first Governor of Indiana and Louisiana Territories, while pioneers seeking new homes in Illinois and beyond the Mississippi traveled here, and the young Abraham Lincoln crossed the Wabash into Illinois on his last pioneer move. After the Civil War, a bridge of timbers with an iron draw midstream spanned the Wabash River, which divides the states of Indiana and Illinois, and in 1931 the two states erected a concrete bridge overlooking the scene of the victory that crowned Clark's march from Kaskaskia and linking the central Continental Highway with the older Buffalo Traces, Indian trails, and dangerous fordings that opened the West and accompanied the country's expansion from ocean to ocean.

Vincennes, Indiana · United States