New Philadelphia: the Illinois town that paid for a family's freedom

All told, Frank McWorter's money bought sixteen people out of slavery — his wife and then himself first — at a cost of $14,000. Part of the money came from a town he founded for the purpose. New Philadelphia, laid out in 1836 in Pike County, Illinois, was the first town platted and registered by an African American before the Civil War — a real-estate venture whose lots were meant to pay for his family's freedom. Nothing of it stands today. What is known comes from census rolls, the memories of descendants, and what archeologists have taken out of the ground.

Saltpeter first, then land

Frank was born enslaved in 1777 in the South Carolina foothills. Taken to Kentucky's Pennyroyal region in 1795, he married Lucy, enslaved on a neighbouring farm, in 1799. Like some enslaved people on a frontier short of labour, he was allowed to hire out his time; on top of that he mined crude niter in the caves at night and on days off and refined it into saltpeter, for gunpowder — in demand all the more once the War of 1812 began.

He bought Lucy's freedom in 1817 and his own in 1819, becoming "Free Frank". In 1829 he traded his saltpeter works for the freedom of his son Frank, who had escaped to Canada. The next year the family moved to land he had bought in Illinois's Military Tract. Owning land let him get around the state's Black Code, which demanded a $1,000 bond from any formerly enslaved person moving in. Three of his children and several grandchildren were still enslaved in Kentucky; he went back for them as the money came in, each trip a risk of being taken himself.

A town, sold by the lot

In 1836 he divided 42 acres into 144 lots, 60 by 120 feet, and sold them to black and white buyers alike. The town had a grocery by 1839, a post office and a stagecoach stop. In 1837 he petitioned the state to take the surname McWorter, which protected his title to the land, and fourteen white neighbours vouched for him.

Frank McWorter died in 1854, having directed his descendants to keep buying relatives free. The town kept growing without him, and after the war it drew formerly enslaved people moving north.

The railroad that went around it

In 1869 the Hannibal–Naples railroad was built through the area. It ran due west to New Salem, arched north around New Philadelphia, and came back south to Barry — both largely white towns. A railroad detoured around a town for its terrain or because other towns lobbied harder, and the evidence points to lobbying: New Philadelphia had no one on the railroad's board. It is not documented that race decided the route; many believe it did. Business followed the tracks, and by the 1940s nothing of the town remained above ground.

What the ground remembers

Excavations from 2002 to 2006 found cellar pits, a building foundation and wells filled with 1850s household trash. Ohio Valley glass and English ceramics show merchants trading through markets like St. Louis. Bones of fish, squirrel, rabbit, opossum and duck point to an "Upland South" diet, matching records that many residents came from Kentucky, Tennessee and the Carolinas. Marbles and doll parts belonged to the town's children; small smoothed discs of ceramic and glass may be pieces from mancala, a game that crossed the Atlantic with the slave trade. A 1903 Illinois State Fair badge confirms that a few people stayed on into the new century. The site was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in August 2005.

Sources

Written from the National Park Service's Teaching with Historic Places lesson New Philadelphia: A Multiracial Town on the Illinois Frontier, a work of the United States government in the public domain, which draws on Juliet E. K. Walker's Free Frank: A Black Pioneer on the Antebellum Frontier (1983) and the National Register nomination by Michelle Huttes (2005).