History up in Flames: George Rogers Clark’s cabin at the Falls of the Ohio

I remember the first time I visited the reconstruction of George Rogers Clark’s cabin on Clark’s Point, on a bluff overlooking the Ohio River and the skyline of Louisville. It was a cool day in early 2016 and I was quite excited to find the site. The cabin site is part of the Falls of the Ohio State Park.

While I have always had a mild interest in local history, my in-depth interest in it began in 2016. The Clark cabin at the Falls was the first Kentuckiana site I visited in my quest to embrace the history of my ancestors and their culture. I had visited that site three times by early 2020. I took many pictures on those trips and also a short video.

George Rogers Clark built a cabin on a few acres overlooking the Falls in 1803. He called it Point of Rock but later generations referred to it as Clark’s Point in honor of the General. He lived there from 1803 until 1809, at which point he moved back across the river to Locust Grove plantation, to live out his final years with his sister Lucy and her husband William Croghan. G.R.C. was in his 50s and in failing health during the approximately six years he lived on Clark’s Point. The old/original cabin at Clark’s Point was destroyed circa 1854.

Clarksville, formally established by G.R.C. in 1783, was the first English speaking settlement in the Northwest Territory. Clarksville was part of the 150,000 acre grant of land given to Clark and his men by Virginia as payment for their service in the American Revolution. And that is where he built his cabin overlooking the river.

In the 6^th chapter of his book George Rogers Clark and the War in the West, professor Lowell H. Harrison stated of G.R.C. that: “He built a cabin at Clarksville about 1803, where he lived for several years, cared for by a two or three family slaves”. John Bakeless, in the 30^th chapter of his 1957 book Background to Glory: The Life of George Rogers Clark, stated of G.R.C. that: “The house was a simple two-story affair, built of hewn logs, two rooms below, and two rooms above, with “stair steps” between, and a small kitchen at the north end, very much like Mulberry Hill. Here he lived with his three slaves, Kitt, Cupid, and Venus”.Kleber’s The Encyclopedia Of Louisville, under the entry for Clark’s Grant, noted in passing that G.R.C. “built a home on the “Point of Rocks” overlooking the Falls, where he lived from 1803 to 1809”.The cabin was also one of the sites briefly profiled in Jane Sarles’ book A History-Lover’s Guide to Kentuckiana.

The exact size and style of G.R.C.’s original cabin is not known for certain. It was two story and possibly had a chimney of either brick or fieldstone. The original cabin was likely about 20×30 feet in dimension. It may have *literally* sat on the edge of the river bank. The river bank has eroded inland over the last two centuries, by an estimated 20 feet, and the current cabin was built a safe distance from the bank.

The reconstruction of this cabin sat on the original plot of 7 acres that Clark lived on just over two centuries ago. The “new” old cabin, a circa 1830 vintage cabin that originally stood near Osgood, IN was disassembled, sent to the park, and carefully rebuilt on the site in 2001. It faced the river, as did the original. The front porch was literally just a stone’s throw from the bank of the Ohio River. The view from the front porch, and from the “gun port” style window slit in the upper story, was of the river and the McAlpine lock and dam complex, with the skyline of Louisville upstream.

The reconstructed old cabin had two rooms on the bottom floor, those being a kitchen with stone fireplace and an empty room on the left. The front door was not centered and led into the kitchen. Stairs in the room on the left led to the upper floor, which was set up as Clark’s bedroom on the right, and left open (no flooring) on the left so that handicapped folks could view the upstairs without going up the stairs. There were few decorations in the cabin when I was there, other than a map, corner cupboard, and some animal skulls. Outside the cabin was (in season) a small garden. The cabin site was open year-round, but the cabin was only unlocked for interior viewing during certain hours in the summertime. I had been to the site three times, but inside the cabin only once, on a beautiful day in June 2017.

The little spot is still formally titled the George Rogers Clark Home Site. The cabin site is at 1102 W Harrison Ave in Clarksville. There is a parking lot by the road. A boat ramp is nearby, and a display with vintage gristmill stones and a limestone model of a keel-boat are within walking distance down the road. One of the mill stones came from G.R.C.’s mill that he operated. To the left of the parking lot is a paved trail leading gently uphill to the cabin site. There is a historical plaque eulogizing G.R.C. on a large rock on the path up to the cabin, apparently placed there in 1922, and there were plaques and displays scattered around the home site and parking lot. There was also a tiny cabin built behind Clark’s cabin to represent where some of his Negro servants lived.

I was in Louisville in early March of 2022 on the Belvedere, near the statue of G.R.C. that stands there, and gazing across the river. I could see the Falls park visitor center, but not Clark’s cabin where I thought it should have been. This is because the cabin was gone.

Less than a week after that I watched the March 15, 2022 documentary History and Dark Legends of Clarksville, Indiana on the Adventures with Roger YouTube channel and was stunned to learn that an arsonist had set fire to Clark’s cabin in May 2021, and destroyed it! I had somehow missed it when that story was briefly in the news cycle, as at that time last year I was not online much and was preparing for a day trip to Bardstown on May 23. I was very saddened by the news of the cabin’s destruction.

The fire occurred during daylight hours on May 20, 2021. A witness was able to help identify the suspect, one Jason Fosse, who was arrested and charged. Several small brush fires were set nearby, but the Clark cabin was the only building that caught fire. I was not able to ascertain if the degenerate who set the fires, a White man in his 30s, was simply a pyro-pervert or was motivated by far-left “woke” ideology against G.R.C.

It was very sad to watch Louisville news footage posted on YouTube of the cabin in flames, and of the fire fighters spraying it down with water and then knocking down remnants of the charred walls that were still standing. The May 20, 2021 Louisville Courier Journal article Fire destroys cabin at George Rogers Clark home site in Southern Indiana by Emma Austin (updated May 23) stated that: “The roof of the cabin collapsed in the fire, and only a portion of the exterior was standing by the time flames were extinguished. Smoke still rose from the rubble at approximately 8 p.m…” Now nothing but the stone chimney remains.

I watched the eleven minute May 20, 2021 news video George Rogers Clark Home Site goes up in flames on WLKY’s YouTube channel, showing the cabin burning, it being an aerial video presumably shot by their news helicopter. The grass at the front and sides of the cabin did not seem burned, and the nearby split rail fence and the tiny McGee cabin behind it were apparently unscathed. The roof and upper floor of the cabin were engulfed in flames long before the exterior walls. This suggests to me that the Clark cabin was specifically targeted by the arsonist, and that he may have broken inside to set the fire.

I saw a photo of a DNR employee carrying the metal (bronze?) historical plaque that had been mounted on the log wall near the front door out of the charred rubble. I hope it will be displayed in the future. I recall that plaque from my last visit, as it was not there on my first two trips to the cabin. The picture of me on the About the Author pages of my little books The Twilight Of Our People? (July 2020) and Into The Twilight (July 2022) was a selfie I took on the cabin porch on my last visit, and shows the plaque to my right.

The Falls park had constructed a tiny cabin literally in the backyard of Clark’s cabin to represent the cabin of the McGee family. A pamphlet I picked up on a visit to the Clark home site in 2017 noted the tiny cabin was to represent the dwelling of Ben and Venus McGee, whom it stated were indentured servants of Clark, and that the park staff was unsure of the location of the original McGee cabin. Further it stated that the McGee folk lived in a small freed-slave community called Guinea Bottoms that was established on Clark’s property about 1802 and that: “Unfortunately, not a lot is known about this community or its occupants”. Indeed. The brief May 6, 2019 YouTube video Exploring Slavery in Indiana at Falls of the Ohio State Park on the channel of the Indiana DNRtold me little more.

The best I could find of the scant documentation for Guinea Bottoms was a short March 19, 2021 article by Diane Stepro on the Discover Indiana website titled Guinea Bottom: The Earliest Black Settlement in Jeffersonville Township and a March 10, 2022 YouTube video titled Guinea Bottoms -The First Black Settlement,on the channel of the Falls of the Ohio Foundation. The latter video is a lecture by one Jeanne Burke, whom I understand is the director of the Clark County Museum in Jeffersonville. The lecture contained much conjecture and a few statements on slave treatment so ludicrous that one wonders if she expected anyone to take her seriously.

I glean that Guinea is a reference to Africa and Bottoms to low lying land (aka not the bluff where Clark’s cabin stood). The official story seems to have slave, indentured servant and free Blacks living together at Guinea Bottoms, maybe, sort-of. Guinea Bottoms, much like the mythology surrounding the “underground railroad”, seems to be one of those minimally documented subjects which get embellished by progressive historians and grows over time. I fear that with Clark’s cabin gone, they will position Guinea Bottoms as the new centerpiece of the narrative at the Clark home site.

As a side note, I visited the aforementioned Clark County Museum earlier this year, in Jeffersonville in Clark county, in what was Clark’s Grant, a couple miles from Clarksville, and they did *not* have a section dedicated to George Rogers Clark! I was told by staff there that some of the display cases had held a display about G.R.C. but had been repurposed to hold native American artifacts. They did have a section about slavery though. They had a painting of Clark in the foyer, but that was about it.

Then in September 2022 I learned that the Falls of the Ohio State Park are finally getting around to what is to be done with the cabin site, fifteen months after the arson. The Falls park held a public meeting about the cabin site in late August. The August 30, 2022 (updated August 31) WHAS online article Community members share what they want to see happen to historic southern Indiana site quoted Falls park official Alan Goldstein as saying that: “Now, there’s other people that are really focused more on George Rogers Clark…but we also want to talk about the Indigenous people, the Black community, because Guinea Bottoms was the first free African American community north of the Ohio River…”. Why am I not surprised?

This WHAS article also noted that the park was bringing in an architecture group from Indianapolis to help decide what to do, which would seem unnecessary if they simply wished to build a new cabin on the old spot. And, a WDRB article about this meeting noted that the arsonist has yet to stand trial.

But there is more. On my first trip to the Falls park in 2016 I saw (and photographed) a sign that proclaimed that the cabin was one of the ten “most endangered” sites in old Clarksville. Next to a picture of the cabin, the text noted that: “High-velocity water from an Ohio River dam pummels the place…the land is disappearing”. Clark’s Point is literally being eroded away by the river, or rather by man’s re-engineering of how the river flows. Progress, through both it’s machines and it’s “woke” ideology, are destroying our past.

I visited the former cabin site in the Spring of 2022, the same day I visited the Clark County Museum, to survey what remained. The cabin footprint was fenced off, with grass regrowing by the chimney. People were picnicking and walking dogs within sight of the ruins. The feel of the place was different. With the cabin gone, it became just a grassy knoll overlooking the river, little different than many other spots on the shore for miles in each direction. At least the boulder with the 1922 dated plaque was still there. I stood there alone and took a couple pictures, then walked away. Unless they build some sort of new memorial to G.R.C. there, which now seems unlikely, I do not intend to ever return.

The Clark cabin was a special place to me. Back when I was planning a biography of Clark, before I got sidetracked in 2020 writing about the chaos unfolding that summer, I was planning to write a chapter about Clark’s cabin overlooking the Falls and his life there. And now it is gone. That cabin was a symbol of Clark and this area’s heritage. It was a tangible connection to the past. What more can I say?

Clark’s cabin at the Falls, March 2020, photo from downstream angle