So I was down train spotting on the east side Friday and happened to grab dinner at a lovely joint called Lisa's Market Street Grill in Prarie Du Rocher. The waitress asked what we were up to and we described our odd feroequinological interests and she asked if we'd stopped by Fort de Chartres, which we had. Turns out they're celebrating their Covid-delayed Tricentennial in September. They hold a rendezvous every year. The big celebration was supposed to be last year, but a certain plague intervened, so it's been pushed back to this year: September 11-12. I feel like the colonial history of the Mississippi Valley is deeply overlooked and this is the sort of event we should be pushing. Yep. We're having tricentennials around here. This isn't even the first one, folks. They've been going on for more than twenty years now. (The first would maybe have been Cahokia in 1996. I'd love to see us celebrating a millennial about now, but it'd be hard to date the founding of the Mississippian city quite that precisely. And it did sort of disappear for a while, sadly.)
Anyway, good tricentennials are a long time brewing. Go enjoy one!
