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, and barracks and officers' quarters inside. Just outside the walls stood the factory, the government trading house where goods were exchanged with Native nations and the reason the post existed at all. About 60 soldiers held it, though the number rose and fell sharply over the fort's five years.

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, during a council inside the unfinished stockade, Sauk warriors outside began dancing and moved toward the gate meaning to come through it. Lieutenant Kingsley, who had been warned, turned out his men and had the cannon wheeled to the gateway with a soldier standing ready to touch it off. The Sauk leaders called the dancers back and no shot was fired. 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) war parties working the country around the post killed two soldiers in March 1812, one ambushed while hunting two miles out and one shot at his sentry post, and a far larger force attacked the fort in September 1812.

The September attack nearly ended the fort. About two hundred Ho-Chunk (Winnebago) and Sauk (Sac) warriors surrounded the post and fought it for four days, firing from the cover the ground gave them: a river bank thirty paces from the walls and a wooded spring run. They tried again and again to burn the garrison out, and the soldiers set fire to their own trading house outside the walls rather than let it shelter the men shooting at them. The attack ended when the attackers had spent their ammunition and withdrew. Among them was the Sauk leader Black Hawk, who shot the halyard in two and brought the fort's flag down.

1813: resistance, supply failure, and evacuation

Fort Madison remained a dangerous post in 1813. Native warriors continued to resist the American military presence, and soldiers faced serious risks whenever they left the protection of the fort. In July, six soldiers were killed in two attacks, including two men from a party sent out to cut wood. These were the last recorded attacks on the fort before its abandonment.

By fall, another problem had become critical: provisions. Fort Madison depended on private contractors and river transportation for much of its food and supplies. The supply system repeatedly failed, and by October some of the garrison's pork and flour was spoiled and unfit to eat.

With winter approaching and continued resupply becoming increasingly difficult, Lieutenant Thomas Hamilton ordered preparations to evacuate Fort Madison. In November 1813, the soldiers loaded government property aboard boats and withdrew down the Mississippi. Before departing, they deliberately burned the fort so that the military post could not be occupied or used by opposing forces.

Fort Madison was not captured in a final battle. Native resistance had made the post increasingly dangerous and difficult to maintain, while the failure of its supply system created the immediate crisis that led to its evacuation as winter approached.

Nothing remained but the chimneys. The fort the soldiers built in 1808 was gone.

Buried, then proven

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. It was never entirely forgotten. One chimney stood long enough that riverboat captains steered by it and called it the Lone Chimney, and in 1908, for the fort's centennial, the Jean Espy Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution raised a replica of that chimney with a bronze tablet over the remains of a blockhouse. What no one had was proof of how the post was laid out.

That came in 1965. The W. A. Sheaffer Pen Company, the famous pen maker that grew up in Fort Madison, was running a water line across its parking lot when the crew turned up material from the fort. The company stopped work and called in the State Archaeologist, and the excavation that followed exposed the fort's central blockhouse and the stone foundations of the officers' quarters, still in place beneath the pavement. Later work traced two blockhouses, the officers' quarters, and the enlisted men's barracks. 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.