Free Frank McWorter and New Philadelphia
Near Hannibal, Illinois
About twenty miles east of Hannibal, in a field that gives no obvious sign of what once stood here, lies the site of New Philadelphia, the first town in the United States platted and registered by an African American. The man who built it earned his freedom before he earned the right to walk freely, and he spent the rest of his life buying the freedom of everyone he loved.
Frank McWorter was born into slavery around seventeen seventy-seven in South Carolina, moved to Kentucky with his enslaver in seventeen ninety-five, and spent the next two decades learning every skill the frontier demanded: farming, mining, manufacturing. By eighteen oh five he had secured the right to hire himself out and use the proceeds as he chose. He identified saltpeter, potassium nitrate essential for making gunpowder, as a commodity he could produce and sell. He built kilns, processed the mineral from limestone caves, and sold it steadily. By eighteen seventeen he had saved enough to purchase his pregnant wife Lucy's freedom for eight hundred dollars, ensuring their child would be born free. Two years later, in eighteen nineteen, he bought his own freedom.
He moved to Illinois in eighteen thirty-one, bought eighty acres of federal land for one hundred dollars, and in eighteen thirty-six filed a plat dividing it into one hundred and forty-four lots. He named the town New Philadelphia, after the Pennsylvania city that anchored the abolitionist movement. He sold lots to both Black and white buyers. The town grew to roughly two hundred people and developed a post office, tavern, church, and school.
But Free Frank's ambition ran deeper than one town. Over the following decades he and his heirs spent the equivalent of roughly half a million dollars in today's money purchasing the freedom of sixteen family members still enslaved in Kentucky, sons, daughters, grandchildren. His heirs freed seven more after his death in eighteen fifty-four.
New Philadelphia was designated a National Historic Site in two thousand and twenty-two. The field that holds it is quiet, but the archaeology underfoot tells the story of a man who built freedom, literally, lot by lot.
