This was in the Chicago Tribune today... interesting! I never thought to see a byline from my family's home time in my local paper. Just curious if there are any of Free Frank McWhorter's descendants on this list doing family research? - Tonia ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Black history unearthed Archeologists in Pike County, Ill., are exposing traces of the first town founded in the United States by an African-American By James Janega Tribune staff reporter Published September 5, 2004 BARRY, Ill. -- The farm field grew corn and native grass for years, the sun-baked land hiding what remained of the first town a black man had founded in the United States. More than a century after the 1836 town of New Philadelphia disappeared into the prairie, scholars digging here hope its broken pots, hand-forged nails and buried garbage will fill in details of life on the nation's old northwest frontier. But historians also say the summer dig in western Illinois has unearthed significant gaps in what is known about black Americans from that time, as differing interpretations have been presented for why blacks and whites lived side-by-side here on the frontier. Pointing to property records showing ownership next door to one another, some have characterized New Philadelphia as an unusual example of racial harmony for its time. Archeologists conducting the dig called the town "a chronicle of racial uplift" in their federal grant proposal. Black historians familiar with the strained race relations of the time, however, dismiss such suggestions as hogwash. "Because whites and blacks lived in the same town, that does not suggest racial harmony," said Juliet E.K. Walker, a historian and descendant of the town's founder. Frontier land speculators could come in any color, she suggested. Early in the three-year study of New Philadelphia, one thing seems certain: Then, as now, race relations were complicated. The story begins with the town's founder, a onetime Kentucky slave later known as "Free" Frank McWorter. A shrewd businessman and land speculator, McWorter escaped servitude by degrees. By offering his owner a cut of the profits, he gained permission to mine saltpeter, a crucial ingredient in gunpowder, on his own time. During the War of 1812, the mining operation ultimately provided McWorter's road to freedom. He bought his wife out of slavery in 1817 and then bought himself two years later, said Walker, director of black history at the University of Texas at Austin and McWorter's great-great-granddaughter. In 1831, nearly broke from buying his sons out of slavery and sensing the possibilities waiting on the frontier in Illinois, McWorter moved out of Kentucky and turned to land speculation in the north. Five years later, records show McWorter laid out New Philadelphia in what was assumed to be desolate land in Illinois, though talk had been growing about building the Illinois & Michigan Canal nearby. He put plans for the town on file with officials in Pike County. It was a signal moment in black history, Walker said. No other black had laid out formal papers for a town before in the United States. The next year, the nation was racked by a depression that lasted until the mid-1840s. A postman wrote in 1841 that, despite occupying a promising site, New Philadelphia held only three houses and that during one ride near town, he had been chased by wolves. Still, in a period when some 20 towns were founded on paper in Pike County, McWorter's actually grew. While Free Frank lived on a farm just outside town limits, New Philadelphia eventually came to attract a blacksmith, a wheelwright, two cobblers and a grocer. By 1850, census figures show 58 people lived there in 11 buildings, respectable for a frontier town. Twenty of the townspeople were black. The rest were white. The presence of whites suggests that "the white settlers may have been relatively free of the period's pervasive white racism," said University of Western Ontario historian Jack Blocker, who studies the time period but is not involved with the Illinois dig. Another scholar, Sundiata Cha-Jua, questions how far to follow the thread of racial harmony. "I'm certain that they weren't living warmly," said Cha-Jua, director of the African-American studies and research program at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. "It's a hotly contested time that in truth does lead us to the Civil War." McWorter died in 1854, an old man at the height of the town's growth. The town died shortly after him, when a railroad cut across the horizon in 1869 and missed his town. By 1880, New Philadelphia was officially dissolved and gradually returned to use as farmland. Interest in the site's past renewed more than a century later, as dusty knickknacks began turning up in the plowed fields east of Barry, Ill. Though little was known about life in New Philadelphia, the town had been commemorated since the 1940s by a painted sign on a pitted tar and gravel road a half-hour drive east of Hannibal, Mo. When talk grew of an interstate highway to connect rural western Illinois with the state capital in Springfield in the 1980s and '90s, interest grew in memorializing the site, including talk of building a highway turnoff there. The turnoff plans were ultimately deemed too complicated, but in 1996 a group calling itself the New Philadelphia Association formed to promote the town as a historic site that could draw outsiders, tourists and the curious. The lone sign was replaced, and as members grew more interested in the town's past, they contacted academics like University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign archeologist Christopher Fennell and Paul Shackel, a University of Maryland anthropologist, to study the town's remains. Phil Bradshaw, a local farmer and president of the New Philadelphia Association, says his group is still pushing for national recognition of the town--a plaque designating it a historic site, or perhaps an interpretive center. But he has shied away from taking sides over how to interpret its racial history. "I don't know anything about this. I just happened to be a fella in a position to make things happen," he said. Still, the racial question is real, said Bradshaw, who is white. "That is one of the challenges facing us," he said. "I am personally so afraid that I culturally will say or do something that isn't correct." Also urging caution is Walker, who has been frustrated by the suggestion of blacks and whites living happily together at a time when fugitive slave laws were toughened and blacks were systematically denied rights, even in free states like Illinois. "People want something uplifting," she said. "But to turn back to the good old days, even if these good old days are being fabricated, is that something good?" The question loomed as volunteers working for Shackel and Fennell followed a plow across the field in 2002 and picked more than 7,000 items from dolls' heads to broken pottery off the ground. This summer, armed with a $230,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, archeologists dug four shallow pits where the ground-level finds were most concentrated. The dirt was "just full of artifacts," said Fennell. One shallow hole seemed to coincide with a trash pit full of chicken and pig bones. Another seemed to be a house foundation. A terra cotta pipe came out of the earth, as did pieces of a child's pewter tea set and tableware made locally and in Staffordshire, England. In five weeks, students had an additional 3,000 objects, cataloged later in crowded rooms at the Illinois State Museum in Springfield. Digs will continue next summer and the year after. Determining the age and origin of the objects will be the easy part, researchers say. It is harder to find in a broken pot whispers of how people behaved toward one another. "There's just a tremendous amount to be done on the social history to tease out the social contours," Fennell said. Researchers at the site, Shackel added, have been cautious about making interpretations. "By no means am I painting this as a place of harmony or a place where people got along," Shackel said. "But I think this is a unique case where people are coexisting in a biracial community, and we need to find out more about this."