By TODD YOUNG
United States Senator
Every year on Veterans Day, we thank America’s veterans and their families for their dedication to protecting our freedoms.
This year, as we celebrate America’s 250th birthday, it is an opportunity to give thanks for our earliest Hoosier heroes – not only for the hardships they bore and the heroics they displayed to free our nation, but for their part in establishing our state. Many of the men who cleared Indiana’s wilderness were also the soldiers who won America’s independence.
One of the most significant victories of the Revolutionary War was fought here in the winter of 1779, when George Rogers Clark and a band of Virginia militiamen marched across flooded and frozen plains to siege Fort Sackville in Vincennes.
By raising the American flag over this lonely frontier outpost, Clark was claiming the Northwest Territory for the new nation, dramatically altering its map and future, and ensuring the eventual formation of Indiana.
Endorsing the construction of the grand monument to Clark’s victory in Vincennes, a New York newspaper wrote in 1929: “It was as necessary as Yorktown. It was more significant than Bunker Hill. It was as inspiring as Valley Forge.”
After the American Revolution was won, cash-strapped states rewarded their veterans not with money, but with land. Virginia awarded 150,000 acres north of the Ohio River – Clark’s Grant – spanning present-day Clark, Floyd, and Scott counties. Hundreds of veterans then settled in the Indiana Territory, as America’s first soldiers became Indiana’s earliest settlers.
Veterans like Captain Robert George, an artillery officer who settled in Clark County and helped establish the first settlement on the Ohio River. His land tract helped found and develop the town of Utica. Upon his death in 1804, his property passed to his family and fellow veterans who were instrumental in founding the communities of Clark County.
Other Revolutionary veterans followed. Thomas Carr, Sr., a captain in the Continental Army, settled in Clark County near Fourteen Mile Creek. Carr served as a delegate to the Indiana Constitutional Convention, helping draft our state’s founding charter and contributing to the design of Indiana’s judicial and election systems.
As the nineteenth century began, thousands joined a migration into the newly created Indiana Territory, leading families over the Cumberland Gap, down the Ohio River, or through the wilderness of the Old Northwest.
Nearly 2,000 veterans of the American Revolution spent the remainder of their lives in Indiana. They rest in small churchyards, on family farms, deep in forests, even in densely populated urban areas, across from schools – often under crumbling headstones whose inscriptions have weathered beyond legibility, save for the faint, enduring words: “A Soldier of the Revolution.”
The wilderness they encountered upon arriving in Indiana has been replaced by communities built upon the ideals these veterans fought for in their time.
Today’s American service members serve across the world, but a chain of devotion connects these worn and crumbling graves to the men and women who wear the uniform today and keep us safe.
On this Veterans Day, let us give thanks to these first Hoosier veterans, the spirit of service and sacrifice they established, and the heroes who carry it forward today. May our nation never forget the selfless sacrifices of our men and women in uniform.
Todd Young, a Republican, represents Indiana in the United States Senate.
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