Pennytown: Eight Acres and a New Beginning

Pennytown was an unincorporated community in Saline County, Missouri, founded in eighteen seventy-one by Joseph Penny, a formerly enslaved man from Kentucky. Penny bought eight acres for one hundred sixty dollars and divided the land into lots he sold to other freed families at prices they could actually afford.

By eighteen eighty, the community had grown to roughly forty families and the Black-owned acreage in the surrounding township had reached more than a third of the total land. At its peak the community may have held close to one thousand residents. What made Pennytown distinctive was not its size but its legal structure: people here held deeds. They were not sharecroppers or tenants. They were landowners, and that ownership was the difference between poverty and the possibility of wealth. The Free Will Baptist Church, rebuilt in nineteen twenty-five, is the only structure still standing.