New Philadelphia: The Town a Formerly Enslaved Man Founded, and What Archeology Found

Twenty-seven years before the Emancipation Proclamation, a man who had spent his first 42 years enslaved founded a town. In 1836, "Free" Frank McWorter bought 42 acres in Pike County, Illinois, divided them into 144 lots, and called the place New Philadelphia — the first town founded by an African American man in the United States. He meant it to be a safe, affordable place for Black and white settlers alike, and by all accounts it was.

The plat of New Philadelphia.

Buying freedom

Frank was born in 1777 in South Carolina to Juda, an enslaved West African woman. In 1795 his owner, George McWhorter, took him to the Kentucky frontier, where Frank met his wife, Lucy. Known for hard work and ingenuity, he was allowed to hire himself out, and in his free time he mined and sold saltpeter, a key ingredient of gunpowder. He bought Lucy's freedom while she was pregnant, so their child would be born free; two years later, in 1819, he bought his own. In 1830 the family moved to a homestead in Illinois.

From farming and the sale of town lots, Frank kept buying relatives out of slavery — children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. In all he freed sixteen family members, at a combined cost of $14,000, an effort his will continued after his death in 1854. New Philadelphia was likely also a stop on the Underground Railroad.

Rise and decline

Today the site is mostly farmland.

What the ground says

Major excavation began in 2002, led by teams from several universities — a rare chance to study a town settled by free African Americans. Over more than a decade they found house foundations, basements and underground structures, and artifacts including glass bottles, ceramics, clay pipes, children's toys and a small 1903 Illinois State Fair badge. Animal and plant remains help reconstruct residents' diets and where they came from. English ceramics point to trade with cities such as St. Louis. And the remains suggest there was no racial segregation of homes or businesses in the town.

New Philadelphia was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2005 and designated a National Historic Landmark in 2009; it is now New Philadelphia National Historic Site.

Sources

Based on "Archeology of New Philadelphia" from the National Park Service, a work of the United States government in the public domain. More is available from the New Philadelphia Archaeological Project at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.