Pennytown: A Freedman Built This Town From Eight Acres

Eight miles south of Marshall in Saline County, Missouri, a small white church sits on land that was once the center of something remarkable: a Black-owned town founded by a formerly enslaved man and built, deliberately and carefully, as a place where freedom meant something you could stand on.

Joseph Penny had been enslaved in Kentucky. After the Civil War, he came to Missouri, and in March of eighteen seventy-one he spent one hundred sixty dollars, his life savings, to purchase eight acres of land. He divided those acres into building lots and sold them at prices that freed families could afford.

The community that grew up around his purchase was called Pennytown. By eighteen seventy-nine, it held roughly forty families spread across sixty-four acres. By eighteen eighty, Black farmers in the surrounding Salt Fork Township owned more than one-third of the land. At its height, historians estimate that perhaps one thousand formerly enslaved people and their descendants lived in and around this community, making it the largest concentration of Black-owned land in Saline County.

What mattered about Pennytown was not its size but its structure. The people here owned their property. They did not sharecrop. They did not owe their houses to a white landowner or their livelihoods to a furnishing merchant. They had deeds. That was the critical difference between this community and the situation most formerly enslaved people found themselves in across the postwar South.

The town had two churches, a school, and a store. The Free Will Baptist Church, originally built in eighteen eighty-six from lumber salvaged from dismantled vacant buildings nearby, burned and was rebuilt in nineteen twenty-five and nineteen twenty-six. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen eighty-eight.

Today the church is all that physically remains of Pennytown. Migration to cities during and after the Second World War, and then the broader integration of American society, gradually drew people away. The acres were absorbed into surrounding farms. But the church, and the story it holds, survived.