History of the fort

A post for a new western border

The United States bought the Louisiana Territory in 1803 and suddenly held claim to an enormous stretch of the Mississippi and the lands beyond it. To make that claim real, the Army planted a small number of posts along the rivers. Old Fort Madison was one of three, built alongside Fort Belle Fontaine near St. Louis and Fort Osage near present-day Kansas City. It was the first permanent United States military post on the Upper Mississippi River.

Construction began in 1808 under the command of First Lieutenant Alpha Kingsley. The soldiers first called the place Fort Bellevue for the view over the river. It was soon renamed for James Madison, the fourth President of the United States, who was elected that same year.

The wrong ground

The site was a poor one for defense, and the soldiers knew it early. The fort sat at the base of a bluff next to a ravine. Attackers could climb that high ground and the broken edges of the ravine and fire down into the post from cover. A fort is supposed to command the ground around it. This one was commanded by the ground around it.

The plan itself was sound enough for a frontier garrison. It was a five-cornered fort, roughly 120 by 160 feet, with blockhouses at the corners, a palisade of upright logs, barracks and officers' quarters inside, and a factory, the government trading house where goods were exchanged with Native nations. About 60 soldiers held it.

Garrison life on the edge of the map

Daily life at the fort was the ordinary hard routine of a small frontier post: drill, guard duty, cutting and hauling firewood, tending the trading house, and trying to stay healthy far from any town. The garrison was small, supplies came upriver and arrived when they arrived, and the men were surrounded by nations who had their own claims to the country and their own reasons to resent an American fort on it.

Tension turned to gunfire quickly. In April 1809, an attempt to storm the fort was turned back by cannon fire. The post held, but the message was plain. The peace around the fort was thin, and it would not last.

The War of 1812 reaches the fort

When war with Britain broke out in 1812, the conflict on the Upper Mississippi sharpened with it. Many Native nations in the region allied with the British, who supplied them and encouraged resistance to American expansion. Ho-Chunk (Winnebago) warriors attacked the fort in March 1812, killing two soldiers, and a far larger force besieged it in September 1812.

The September siege nearly ended the fort. More than two hundred Ho-Chunk (Winnebago), Sauk (Sac), and Meskwaki (Fox) warriors pressed in close and at one point the post was nearly overrun. It was saved when cannon fire destroyed a fortified position the attackers had built near the walls. Among them was the Sauk leader Black Hawk, who later said he had shot down the fort's flag.

1813: cut off, burned, and gone

The fort survived 1812, but the country around it never settled. In 1813 a determined siege cut the garrison off from its firewood, which on the Mississippi in the cold months was as serious as cutting off ammunition. The soldiers could not hold a post they could not heat or supply, on ground that gave every advantage to the people outside the walls.

In September 1813 the garrison gave up the fort. Rather than leave it standing for an enemy to use, the soldiers set it on fire as they left. They slipped out after dark through a trench dug down to the river, reached boats waiting in the water, and were carried away. Black Hawk later said that nothing was left of the fort but the chimneys.

Nothing remained but the chimneys. The fort the soldiers built in 1808 was gone, and the ground returned to the people who had pushed them off it.

Lost, then found again

The town of Fort Madison grew up over and around the site in the decades that followed, and the burned fort faded into the ground beneath it. For a long time the post lived mostly in records and old accounts rather than on the land.

That changed in 1965. Archaeologists working in the parking lot of the W. A. Sheaffer Pen Company, the famous pen maker that grew up in Fort Madison, exposed the fort's central blockhouse and the stone foundations of the officers' quarters, still in place beneath the pavement. The fort had been lost under the modern town and found again under a factory lot. The dig confirmed exactly where the post had stood and gave later builders a real plan to follow. In 1973 the site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Rebuilt by the community

In the mid-1980s, a replica of the fort was built near the original site on the riverfront. Much of the work was done by volunteers, including inmates from the Iowa State Penitentiary. The reconstruction turned a buried memory back into something a visitor could walk through.

Today Old Fort Madison is a living-history site on the Mississippi riverfront, with tours, reenactments, and education programs that bring the early 1800s back to life. Old Fort Madison Preservation, Inc. now leads a $3.5 million capital campaign to raise the site above the flood plain, preserve and improve it, and add a new Welcome Center/Living History Center, so the story stays standing for the next generation.