NEW PHILADELPHIA TOWN SITE
Historic Site — Section 27, Hadley Township, South of County Highway 2, Barry, Pike County, Illinois
Status: Operating · Access: Open to public
Dossier: https://haunthunt.com/place/new-philadelphia-town-site-illinois/

NPS-listed historic site associated with the Underground Railroad.

New Philadelphia Town Site is a historic site in Barry, Illinois, a National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom listing. NPS-listed historic site associated with the Underground Railroad. The archive files it under dark history, Underground Railroad history and the Underground Railroad. The dossier holds 3 documented facts — the record is history-forward, no paranormal claims on file. The site is open to visitors.

Free Frank McWorter bought his wife's freedom first — pregnant Lucy, so the child would be born free — then his own in 1819, then, over the following decades, fifteen more family members, at a total cost of $14,000 he'd earned mining saltpeter and farming. Born enslaved in South Carolina in 1777, forty-two years in bondage, he'd worked the Kentucky frontier's saltpeter caves — gunpowder for the War of 1812 — and turned the earnings into the purchase of his entire family. Then he did something no Black American had done: in 1836 he platted a town.
New Philadelphia was 144 lots on forty-two acres in Pike County, Illinois — the first town legally registered by an African American before the Civil War. It looked like every other frontier town — blacksmith, cabinetmaker, wheelwright, preacher — except that Black and white families lived side by side in it, in a state whose Black Codes were the harshest in the region, on land between the Mississippi and Illinois rivers where the lots Frank sold bought more of his family out of Kentucky. No racial violence was ever reported in the town — the census recorded the experiment working.
The railroad bypassed it in 1869 and the town dissolved by 1885 — the plows eventually turned the site back to field. Nothing remained above ground by the 1940s; the archaeology brought it back — the excavations that made it a National Historic Site in 2022 found the town under the soil: the foundations, the artifacts, the grid of the first town a Black man founded in America.
New Philadelphia is the archive's bought-freedom file — the town founded by a man who purchased sixteen people out of slavery one at a time, where the blacksmith's hammer rang over a community that was integrated by design and is now a National Historic Site under a field.

WHY THIS FILE MATTERS
New Philadelphia is the archive's first-town file — the 1836 Pike County settlement platted by Free Frank McWorter, the first town legally registered by an African American, where lot sales funded the purchase of fifteen enslaved relatives and Black and white families lived side by side.
A town founded to buy freedom keeps its grid — the file's suggestion being that New Philadelphia's hold is the ledger: the 144 lots whose sales bought a family out of Kentucky, in the field where archaeology found the town that plowing erased.

HISTORY — 3 documented facts
· NPS includes this site in the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom. New Philadelphia Town Site's past is on record — the entry belongs to the verified layer the museum itself interprets. The record holds it as fact — documented, not retold. The record appears in 'Public NPS Network to Freedom listings, row 2, ID 01GA01'. Documented ground is what separates this file from pure legend — this is part of it.
· New Philadelphia Town Site is documented on the National Park Service Network to Freedom for its role in the Underground Railroad. A documented site gives the file real substance; this entry is part of that record. The fact is historically verified — the part of the file that doesn't need hedging. Sources including 'NPS Network to Freedom listing' carry the record. The date is part of the site's documented spine.
· The 1836 town is documented. A documented site gives the file real substance; this entry is part of that record. The fact is historically verified — the part of the file that doesn't need hedging. The detail is preserved in 'NPS Network to Freedom listing'. Documented ground is what separates this file from pure legend — this is part of it.

SOURCES — 3 cited
· Public NPS Network to Freedom listings, row 2, ID 01GA01 — National Park Service
  https://www.nps.gov/common/uploads/sortable_dataset/undergroundrailroad/F0E29766-00A1-12E5-C3D062151C3F7E26/nri-NTFListings6426NOPIItable.csv?t=1784017173223
· NPS Network to Freedom listing — National Park Service
  https://www.nps.gov/subjects/ugrr/index.htm
· Underground Railroad — Wikipedia
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_Railroad

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