Qualla: Old Cahokia Courthouse

Old Cahokia Courthouse: Introduction

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rklawton, CC BY-SA 3.0. How many times can you take a building apart and put it back together before it becomes a different building? The Cahokia Courthouse has been dismantled and reconstructed three times since 1904. First it was carried across the Mississippi to St. Louis for the World's Fair. Then it was shipped to Chicago's Jackson Park. Finally, Cahokia residents -- furious that their oldest building had been moved to the opposite end of the state -- lobbied to bring it home. By the time it returned in the 1920s, very little of the original 1740 timber remained. The state of Illinois says the rebuilt courthouse 'contains some pieces' of the original structure. It is the most honest kind of historic preservation: a building that admits it is mostly a replica while insisting that the story it tells is entirely real.

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Image: Rklawton | CC BY-SA 3.0

Old Cahokia Courthouse: Logs Standing Upright

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. The building traces its ancestry to a French-Canadian log cabin built around 1740, in a region the French had claimed following the explorations of Marquette, Jolliet, and La Salle in the 1670s. The Mississippi Valley south of the Missouri River offered exceptionally fertile allu...

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Image: Public domain

Old Cahokia Courthouse: Frontier Justice in Four Rooms

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Anon a mouse Lee, CC BY-SA 4.0. After the American Revolution and the 1783 Treaty of Paris transferred the east bank of the Mississippi from Great Britain to the United States, frontiersmen organized St. Clair County on April 27, 1790 -- the first county in the Illinois region of the Northwest Territory. They n...

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Image: Anon a mouse Lee | CC BY-SA 4.0

Old Cahokia Courthouse: Three Lives of One Building

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Anon a mouse Lee, CC BY-SA 4.0. By 1904, the courthouse had become one of the oldest surviving buildings in Illinois, and promoters for the St. Louis World's Fair bought it, dismantled it, and hauled the surviving posts across the river as a fair attraction. When the fair ended, the cabin was dismantled again a...

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Image: Anon a mouse Lee | CC BY-SA 4.0

Old Cahokia Courthouse: Standing Still at Last

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jonathunder, Public domain. Since 1985, the reconstructed Cahokia Courthouse has been managed by the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency. It is interpreted to resemble its appearance around 1800, when it served as a frontier courthouse of the Northwest Territory. Exhibits focus on the legal cases that onc...

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Image: Jonathunder | Public domain