New Philadelphia Town Site

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.