Cahokia Mounds

Why should it be a National Park?

Eight miles east of St. Louis stands the largest earthen structure in the Americas. Monks Mound covers fourteen acres at its base and rises a hundred feet in four terraces, and it is only the biggest of roughly eighty surviving mounds from a city that once had more than a hundred and twenty. At its height around 1100 AD, Cahokia held more people than London did at the same moment. It was the largest city north of Mexico, and it would not be matched anywhere in what became the United States until Philadelphia in about 1800.

Cahokia is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a National Historic Landmark. It is not a unit of the National Park System. It is an Illinois state historic site, sitting beside a highway in a landscape of strip malls and rail yards, and the contrast between its global standing and its everyday surroundings is the first thing most visitors notice. Since 2019 Representative Mike Bost and Senator Dick Durbin have pushed to make it a national historical park spanning Illinois and Missouri, linking Monks Mound with Sugarloaf Mound in St. Louis, the last surviving mound in that city, and other sites in three Illinois counties. The Interior Department has asked for a special resource study first, which is the federal way of saying not yet. The case is simple enough: if the largest ancient city in the country is not National Park material, it is hard to say what would be.