Philippe Concession comes, just now and then, into focus. As they described markers, boundaries, trees, streams, and bluffs to notaries, the natural world on the St.
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Philippe, French men and women signed often with an “X,” “not knowing how to write.” But these settlers who went to Fort de Chartres to legalize transactions knew other things: the most intimate details of their physical world, and they left notice for us: the stumps of old cherry trees, where fences and paths lay, a disintegrating house wall, “the first plum tree on the edge of the road,” an ash grove on a hill…or a road leading to the marsh. In the floodplain villages of Prairie du Rocher, Chartres, and St. A notary tediously copied out records with quill and ink, using the words that no doubt also appear in such records from Montreal and New Orleans: “….such as the whole now lies and stands, which said Louis Honore Tesson declares he well knows, for having seen and visited the same.” 1 The complexity of a mature, healthy prairie wetlands loud with bird and insect voices is but faintly suggested in French notarial language to us today, the translated legal phrases seem dry and repetitive. Although mentioned over and over in descriptions of property, this marsh is still elusive. Philippe Concession of 1723 lay a great marsh - Le Grande Marais. Without the notarial records kept by the 18th century French – land sales, labor contracts, wheat, flour, and fur sales, construction plans, sales of horse mills and grist mills, and estate inventories - we would have few ways of visualizing a remarkable ecosystem just before we lost it.
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Because a French mining engineer named Philip Renault obtained a large land grant in what would become Monroe County in the American Bottom, we have words to understand a vanished place.