We've enjoyed a terrific first summer season of excavations at the New
Philadelphia site in western Illinois. Here are a couple of the recent
news articles:
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Supporters want lost town founded by black man named historic site
Saturday June 26, 2004
By JAN DENNIS
Associated Press Writer
In a remote pasture in western Illinois, researchers have been digging up
buttons, porcelain and other artifacts from a former frontier village
launched by a freed slave.
It's the earliest known town incorporated by a black man in the country,
and researchers want it named a national historic site. Crews will wrap up
their first archaeological dig this weekend in the field, located about 30
miles southeast of Quincy.
Historians say Frank McWorter launched the integrated town of New
Philadelphia in 1836, a quarter century before the Civil War.
``'Free Frank' is every bit as much an American hero as Frederick Douglass
or Martin Luther King,'' said Vibert White, a history professor and
project consultant.
Researchers have been combing the plowed field for nearly two years. They
uncovered thousands of artifacts, including nails, buttons and pieces of
broken glass, ceramics and brick, said Paul Shackel, the project's lead
archaeologist.
They started digging deeper last month, using a $200,000 National Science
Foundation grant. The grant also will pay for digs the next two summers
and a laboratory analysis of the artifacts, said Shackel, director of the
University of Maryland's Center for Heritage Resource Studies.
So far, the excavation has turned up traces of about a third of New
Philadelphia's 30 or so residences, as well as trash pits, which could
provide clues to dietary habits and lifestyles, Shackel said.
He said buttons and thimbles could offer a glimpse of household
activities, while fragments of porcelain dolls and dishes could show
whether the village traded with other cities or was shut off because of
its roots.
``All of this will eventually tell the story of New Philadelphia how
people lived their everyday life. Our goal is to show how an integrated
community survived. By the third summer, we should have a real nice view
of what this town looked like and how people interacted,'' Shackel said.
McWorter, whose grave is near the lost town, was a slave for a Kentucky
man who allowed him to earn wages in his spare time. He saved, bought a
small farm and earned enough money to buy his freedom, as well as his
wife's.
He later traded his Kentucky farm for another farm in western Illinois
that prospered. That enabled him to buy the freedom of his slave-born
children and other relatives. He then bought more land and established New
Philadelphia, giving the newly freed slaves a place to buy homes and
become independent.
New Philadelphia grew to about 170 people 35 percent black and began to
slowly fade away when it was bypassed by the railroad in 1869, Shackel
said.
Supporters of the town want it to be placed on the National Register of
Historic Places. Ultimately, they want to make it part of the National
Park Service, which would require an act of Congress.
Rep. Ray LaHood, a Republican who represents the area, has followed the
project and would consider sponsoring the town's addition to the park
system, said spokesman Tim Butler.
White, who headed the project until he moved to the University of Central
Florida last year, thinks New Philadelphia's legacy could attract 25,000
to 100,000 visitors a year.
``When you think of black people in that era, you think of slavery and
hostility. This town was focused on Americanism, trying to create a
society free of ill feelings toward any race,'' White said.
(Copyright 2004 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
****
Evidence of First Black Planned Community in Ill.
Date: Friday, June 25, 2004
By: Wayne Dawkins, BlackAmericaWeb.com
Archeologists Friday are to finish digging up a plowed field in Illinois
that has evidence of New Philadelphia, Ill., apparently the first planned
black town in America.
“Frank McWorter purchased 42 acres,” Terrance Martin, curator of
anthropology at the Illinois State Museum in Springfield, told
BlackAmericaWeb.com. “He drew 60- by 120-foot lots. It’s the earliest
planned community, planned by an African-American in North America.”
That would be 1836.
Martin added: “There are other black towns in Illinois, but they are
crossroads settlements, not planned communities.”
Paul Shackel, director of the Center for Heritage Resource Studies at the
University of Maryland, said, “McWorter’s a legend out here [in Illinois].
He’s in the atlases and county history.”
McWorter, said Martin, was born a slave in South Carolina. His master
moved to Kentucky. There, the master allowed McWhorter to save money he
earned at a salt peeter operation. As a result, McWorter purchased his
freedom and his wife’s freedom for $800 each, and also freed at least 16
descendants.
McWorter came to Illinois in 1831, purchased land and established a
farming operation, believed to be corn and wheat, said Shackel. New
Philadelphia was incorporated in 1836.
While known in rural Illinois, the former slave turned town builder is
virtually unknown to the rest of us. Pike County is in west central
Illinois, 70 miles west of state capital Springfield, and 25 miles east of
Hannibal, Mo., birthplace of Mark Twain.
Shackel, who is directing the dig, said he became aware of New
Philadelphia two years ago when he was invited by an Afro-American studies
professor at the University of Illinois at Springfield to learn more about
the early 19th century town.
“I suggested we do an archeological survey,” said Shackel. “We partnered
with the Illinois State Museum, got volunteers, and we walked the plowed
field where we thought the town was located.
“We found people’s garbage. That’s how we determined where the people
lived.”
Shackel said New Philadelphia lasted nearly 100 years: After incorporation
in 1836, the first houses were built in 1840. By 1855, there were 58
people. By 1870, there were 170 people in 31 households.
Then the railroad came to Pike County in the 1870s. The train avoided the
town.
Martin said local lore is the rail line was routed north of New
Philadelphia to avoid the black town, but the curator said it was probable
that terrain issues, not race, affected where the tracks were laid.
Nevertheless, because the railroad missed the farm community, “We believe
most people left,” said Shackel. The town was unincorporated in 1885.
By 1900, seven to eight families remained. Gradually, by the 1950s, all
signs of the town disappeared. It was plowed over as if it never existed,
said a release from the University of Maryland.
In two years, Shackel and his team have recovered over 10,000 artifacts,
including items unexpected in a frontier location, such as porcelain dolls
and fine china. This summer the team has unearthed foundations, storage
cellars and pits related to the town’s early settlement, providing further
clues to the settlers’ lifestyles, said the University of Maryland.
“What is important about what we’ve discovered is the artifacts are
intact,” said Shackel. “We thought the artifacts might be destroyed
because of plowing. Our goal is to get the town on the National Register
of Historic Places.
“I’m very convinced it can have status like Nicodemus, Kan., which is
run by the National Park Service and is one of 380 National Park Service
sites.”
With summer excavations ending Friday, in July students will process the
artifacts at the Illinois State Museum.
Martin said, “Over the years we will work to have temporary exhibits of
the artifacts. We might set up in Pike County. We also want to get the
artifacts in a climate controlled setting and accessible to other
researchers.”
Researchers, said Martin, should find this detail interesting: New
Philadelphia was integrated. “We’re checking genealogies and we are
finding links to Cuba, Ireland and New England,” he said.
“The more we learn, the more interesting and significant New Philadelphia
becomes.”
****
Archaeologists unearthing life of early integrated town in Illinois
Andrea Lynn, Humanities Editor, U. Illinois
217-333-2177; [log in to unmask]
7/1/04
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Independence Day has taken on new layers of meaning for
a team of archaeologists who’ve been digging in western Illinois this
summer.
In fact, nearly everything about the excavation in the rolling farmland
near Barry speaks volumes about freedom and liberty, nearly everything
adds a chapter to the American Dream.
Sponsored by a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation’s
Research Experiences for Undergraduates Program and led by staff from one
museum and two universities, including the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, the dig in the pastureland formerly known as New
Philadelphia is uncovering “the contours of the daily life of the first
town incorporated by an African American before the Civil War.”
So says project co-director Christopher Fennell, an archaeologist who
specializes in 18th and 19th century archaeology and African-American
history. His co-directors are Paul Shackel, an anthropologist at the
University of Maryland, and Terrance Martin, an archaeologist and
associate curator at the Illinois State Museum. Members of a local
non-profit association and other scholars with whom those community
members had first begun working recruited the leaders for their research
expertise.
“As archaeologists, we’re interested in the lifeways and social history of
the dozens of families who lived in the town, but about whom very little
is known,” said Fennell, a U. of I. research associate who next month will
join Illinois’ anthropology department as a professor of archaeology.
New Philadelphia’s story is not entirely unknown. Lying in fertile fields
between the Mississippi and the Illinois rivers, the town was founded in
1836 by Frank McWorter (1777-1854), a former slave from Kentucky who came
to be known as “Free Frank.”
Through remarkable entrepreneurial skills, McWorter not only raised the
funds to buy his wife, himself and 16 members of his family out of
slavery, but also trekked from Kentucky to Illinois, bought 42 acres of
land, established New Philadelphia, and then turned it into a thriving
prairie community by selling parcels of his land to other enterprising
individuals.
It was no small feat that the integrated community succeeded. It was,
after all, “one of the toughest time periods in American history and in a
landscape that was shaped by racial strife,” Fennell said.
“People will say Illinois was a free state, but there were all sorts of
ways that folks practiced slavery in Illinois, and there was a tremendous
amount of social tension over being caught between the winds of Missouri
and the neighboring slave states,” he said.
Still, New Philadelphia was “a fascinating and unique circumstance,”
Fennell said, “so we want to discover how it unfolded over time. We will
spend years doing research, trying to unpack how this little integrated
agricultural community worked, how those families got along and interacted
with each other.”
Fennell said it is very likely that the townsfolk, including the
McWorters, were involved in the Underground Railroad. Hannibal, Mo., was
just 20 miles to the east “and there were a number of major abolitionists
and grassroots escape routes flowing though that area at the time.”
New Philadelphia thrived as an agricultural market center for 50 years,
but its life-blood began draining out after the Hannibal & Naples Railroad
bypassed it in the 1870s. By 1920, only a few families remained, the
others having moved to prosperous towns on the railroad lines. Eventually
the town turned, like much of the state, into agricultural land.
But during its good times, the town hummed harmoniously along with
families of all kinds: African Americans, “who had their own poignant
history,” recent immigrants from Ireland, England and Canada, European-
Americans, and possibly Native Americans.
Much of Free Frank’s fascinating personal story was uncovered by former
U. of I. history professor Juliet Walker, herself the great great
granddaughter of the man.
According to Fennell, the team has used “a remarkable array of research
techniques” to uncover the extinct town and its people. “Juliet Walker’s
fabulous study gave us leads on how to approach the town history,” Fennell
said.
In the first phase of the project, dozens of volunteers walked a line over
26 acres of the town site, flagging every artifact on the ground, culling
some 7,000 items for their effort.
In the second survey phase, geophysicist Michael Hargrave from the U. S.
Army Corps of Engineers in Champaign conducted a geophysics survey, using
electric current and electromagnetic monitors to determine features below
the surface of the ground, including potential stonewalls and other
foundation remains.
Fennell attributes much of the field school’s early success to
the “cutting-edge approach to layering survey methods before we even chose
where to do the in-ground excavation.”
The actual digging began May 25. The research team of professionals,
graduate and undergraduate students spent the first five weeks of the
program in the field, excavating for artifacts and the foundations of
houses and other buildings. Now they are working at the Illinois State
Museum’s Research and Collection Center in Springfield cataloging and
analyzing their finds, including artifacts, soil and archaeobiological
materials.
Findings “consistent with the time period of New Philadelphia,” Fennell
said, include broken dinnerware, iron nails and hardware, miniature toys,
clay marbles, and all sorts of “personal wares,” including buttons,
fragments of bone combs and toothbrushes, comprising thousands of
additional items for analysis.
For Fennell, the most exciting finds to date have been the “intact
foundation remains,” exciting in view of one of the team’s priorities: to
have the entire town placed on the National Register of Historic Places.
For that to happen, certain things, for example, intact archaeological and
architectural features, should be present.
“So rather than just digging a site and collecting all the artifacts that
may have been part of a trash dump, for example, we’re specifically
interested in finding the remains of the foundations, the footprints of
the homes and buildings that were used there.
“We’ve had tremendous success already this summer in that we have five or
six such features already uncovered, and so we’ll be applying this coming
fall to get the entire town on the National Register of Historic Places.”
It is rare for an entire town to be placed on this register, Fennell
noted.
However, there are hundreds of people pulling for that to happen.
“Both the local community and the descendant community – folks who are
descended from the original families but who now live elsewhere – have
been fairly vocal thus far in saying they would like to see an
interpretive visitors center built at or near the site, where this
incredible story of New Philadelphia will be told, and where you can see
some of the archaeological remains and the landscape of the town.”
The surrounding communities of Pike County have, in fact, been “just
incredibly supportive,” Fennell said.
“This was the most well-appointed archaeological dig I’ve ever been on.
Through their own fundraising and logistical support, they helped provide
us with a large tent and with a trailer that was air-conditioned and had
running water. … In addition, a local hunting lodge provided room and
board for the students at significantly discounted rates.
“We kept trying to tell the students that this wasn’t the way the average
archaeological project worked,” Fennell said.
The students are a story in themselves, Fennell said: “a remarkably
integrated group in terms of their own ethnic and cultural heritage who
are studying the history of a remarkably integrated town.”
“A primary consideration was to try to attract students who are of an
ethnic or cultural heritage that is underrepresented in these kinds of
research projects,” Fennell said. “Another consideration was to provide
such hands-on research experience to students enrolled at smaller liberal
arts colleges who would not normally have access to these kinds of
scientific research-methods programs during the summer.”
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