Your feet rest on Chicago's exact birthplace. In 1803 the U.S. Army built a small log stockade here at the mouth of the Chicago River, naming it Fort Dearborn after the Secretary of War. It guarded a portage that linked the Great Lakes to the Mississippi watershed, a crossing that Indigenous peoples had used for centuries.
During the War of 1812, as the garrison evacuated, it was attacked by Potawatomi warriors in a deadly engagement long called the Fort Dearborn massacre. The fort was rebuilt, then finally demolished by the 1850s as the city exploded around it. Look down at the bridgehouse plaza: brass markers set into the pavement trace the fort's vanished outline.
From this exact spot, a settlement of a few hundred would become one of the largest cities in America in a single human lifetime.