It took a few years, but historian Adriana Schroeder dug deep and finally came up with the birth date for the Illinois National Guard: May 9, 1723 — nearly a century before Illinois entered the Union.
Thank you for supporting our journalism. This article is available exclusively for our subscribers, who help fund our work at the Chicago Tribune.King Leopold III of Belgium, center, stands with members of the 106th Cavalry Regiment after his rescue from a Nazi compound May 6, 1945, in rural Austria. The king later told members of the Illinois National Guard unit he would"never forget that day that my family and I had the good fortune to be delivered from the enemy by your unit.
“I figured out everything there was to figure out, got everyone’s opinion. But the big kicker was a discovery made by a woman named Margaret Kimball Brown in the basement of the Vandalia courthouse. They had a flood and she was going through what to save, what to pitch and whatnot. That’s when the French records from Kaskaskia were found.”
“The captain of the militia served as the justice of the peace, and often was like the local sheriff,” Schroeder said. “They also served as highway road crews,” keeping routes between settlements passible for trade and to hasten response times in case another village needed defensive help. Before returning it to the family, they used it for an important mission. After learning Belgian King Leopold III was detained in a lodge compound nearby, a group of seven Illinois officers armed only with their handguns used the vehicle, still outfitted like a Nazi staff car, for a rescue effort.
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