A Donor's Thoughts

"Having hatched in Hadley Township, a few miles west of New Philadelphia 82 years ago, it seemed right that I should contribute to making the history I never knew, known."
W.F., recent donor to the New Philadelphia Association.

We thank this wonderful gentleman for his donation. Donations and/or memberships are always needed and welcomed by the New Philadelphia Association. See http://www.newphiladelphiail.org/members.htm for more information.

a thought in passing ...

"The modern man takes life far too seriously, and because he is too serious, the world is full of troubles."

The Chinese philosopher, Lin Yutang, from his 1937 book, The Importance of Living

the last week ...

From Terry Martin:

The final week of the 2005 New Philadelphia Project has arrived. Our lab
work at the Illinois State Museum Collection Center is concluding for the season, and this will be the final brown-bag lecture. Please inform anyone who you think may be interested.

Wednesday July 27 at Noon...

TITLE:
"The National Negro Convention Movement:
A Political Context for Blacks in the First Half of the 19th Century"

PRESENTED BY:
Dr. Kamau Kemayo
Assistant Professor and Chair of the African-American Studies Program
University of Illinois at Springfield

Hope you can attend!

Explorers look at frontier life in biracial town

Here is an article from the Rockford Register Star

 COLUMNIST: Aaron Chambers
Explorers look at frontier life in biracial town

Amid the rolling hills of rural Pike County, southeast of Quincy, Frank McWorter was the first African-American believed to incorporate a town in America.

It was 1836 and McWorter was a freed slave who bought, subdivided and sold 42 acres. He called the town New Philadelphia and, in a home just outside it, he lived out his time.

The town's population grew to more than 160. It was said to be home to a blacksmith and a handful of other craftsmen. And despite the racial tension that underscored antebellum America, the town was home to both whites and blacks.

On Wednesday, more than a century after the town of New Philadelphia began disappearing, debate continued over just what all that means.

"IS NEW PHILADELPHIA about one man, Frank McWorter?" asked Paul Shackel, a University of Maryland anthropologist who is leading an excavation of the site.

"Is it about the African-American community and its ability to survive for 100 years in a racist society? Is it about freedom? Is it about race relations in a biracial town? Or is it about the other people that are not recorded in the historical records? My answer is: I think it's all of the above."

Shackel was discussing the latest phase of the excavation with folks gathered at the Illinois State Museum's research facility in Springfield. He narrated a slide show and discussed various artifacts that were uncovered, including a fork, buttons, a miniature tea set and dozens of nails.

Some of these treasures, chunks of ceramic pottery, were uncovered by Rockford's own Gail Kirk, who was among a group of University of Illinois at Champaign students who helped search for artifacts.

"You can date fairly accurately according to that," the 20-year-old anthropology major said of the ceramics. "That's why ceramics are so interesting, especially the ones with intricate patterns on them. You can figure out who made them."

SHACKEL WENT ON at length about the town's biracial dynamics and its supposed racial harmony. He said he hoped the excavation would help complete the town's social history.

The audience was engaged.

"I still think there's a huge gap here," said Elizabeth Crowley, a retired college English teacher from Jacksonville. "How do so many rusty nails and toy pewter sets give you any insight into justice?"

Shackel said archaeologists ought to be flexible in their thinking as they build a record of the town. "I think we need to move beyond what we already know," he said.

A man in the audience asked Shackel why, if racial tension was so heavy, would whites move to a town founded by blacks?

"I think that racism did exist," Shackel responded. "But I also think that people worked together in the community to move ahead, especially during the frontier era. People had to band together in order to survive and people relied on each other."

Shackel and his team intend to continue digging next year. The provocative questions about that time -- and what it may help reveal about this one -- appear to have just begun.    

Research answers, raises questions

Here is an article from the Quincy Herald Whig on Saturday:

 

Research answers, raises questions

Saturday, July 16, 2005

 

By Deborah Gertz Husar

Herald-Whig Staff Writer

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — Paul Shackel doesn't want to do archaeology solely to dig up stuff.

"I want to do archaeology that's socially relevant to a larger community," Shackel said. "We need to move beyond what we already know. We need to start looking at different angles, the larger context."

Shackel, head of the Center for Heritage Resources at the University of Maryland, oversees a summer field school at the New Philadelphia site in Pike County. A $226,500 National Science Foundation grant brings nine students to the site for three summers.

Shackel highlighted the project in a program and displayed artifacts from the site this week at the Illinois State Museum Research and Collections Center in Springfield as part of the Paul F. Mickey Monthly Archaeology Lecture Series.

"Is New Philadelphia about one man, Frank McWorter, the African-American community and its ability to survive 100 years in a racist society? Is it about freedom? Is it about race relations in a biracial town, or is it about the other people that aren't recorded in the historical records," Shackel said. "My answer is it's all of the above."

That answer leads to more questions of how to interpret the site, whether to rebuild it or reconstruct it off site, build a museum or an interpretative center.

"These are all issues people will have to face when interpreting the history of New Philadelphia," Shackel said.

Shackel outlined three goals for archaeology as social justice:

* Critically analyze and ex-pose racism in the past and present and to dismantle the structures of oppression when we can.

* Explore diversity in the past and promote it in the present.

* Create a color-conscious past rather than a colorblind past. Be aware of what happened in the past.

New Philadelphia starts with Frank McWorter, born a slave in South Carolina. He moved to Kentucky to manage his owner's farm and worked in a saltpeter mine in his off time to make money to buy his wife and himself out of slavery. He came to Pike County in 1831, platted New Philadelphia in 1836 and started to sell 144 lots to make money to buy more family members out of slavery.

McWorter never lived in New Philadelphia — he lived and farmed just north of the town — but saw the community thrive as a home for blacks and whites. The town began to fade after the railroad bypassed it in 1869. Up to 30 percent of the town's population was black in an era and location with racial overtones. The last family left in the 1930s.

"I think racism did exist, but I think people worked together in the community to move ahead, especially in the frontier area," Shackel said.

Sunday, July 17, 2005

The Rockford Register Star published this article (click here) about the New Philadelphia dig in its Saturday edition.

MSNBC.com Article: Digging into town's history

Here is an interesting article from the Burlington Hawk-Eye:

 

Digging into town's history
Excavation of pre-Civil War town offering interesting insights.
_____________________________

By DAVID GRIMES

The Burlington Hawk Eye

Burlington, IA - Excavation of pre-Civil War town offering interesting insights. for The Hawk Eye

An African-American slave from South Carolina who worked his way to freedom in the early 1800s established a community where persons of all racial backgrounds would be welcome a century and a half before Rodney King ever wondered if we all could just get along.

"Free Frank" McWorter was born in South Carolina in 1777, but purchased his freedom while working as a slave for a man in Kentucky who allowed McWorter to earn wages in his spare time.

McWorter eventually moved to west-central Illinois where he put down roots near Barry, Ill., about 30 miles southeast of Quincy, and where he incorporated the town of New Philadelphia in 1836.

McWorter eventually returned to the South to purchase the freedom of 16 of his family members at a cost of $14,000.

This month the New Philadelphia site was named to the Illinois Register of Historic Places.

It is the first known case of a town being laid out and registered by a freed slave in the United States. The town's population was approximately 30 percent black and 70 percent white and thrived through the Civil War and beyond in a county more inclined to be sympathetic rather than hostile toward slave-holding states.

A team of 30 students looking for clues to what life was like at New Philadelphia during its 100 or so years of existence completed the second of three summer digs at the site on Saturday. Ten of the students involved in the excavation were selected from colleges and universities around the country to participate in the dig through the National Science Foundation Experiences for Undergraduate students program. The other 14 students are archaeology and anthropology students from the University of Illinois.

The NSF students received weekly stipends, room and board for their participation in the project, while U of I students received 6 credit hours for their time invested in the field study dig.

"It (the NSF program) offers field research experience for undergraduate students working toward various degrees from colleges around the country and who might not otherwise get the opportunity for this kind of experience," Evan Patuelo, a graduate assistant from Southern California working on her doctorate in prehistoric archaeology at the U of I and who worked at the New Philadelphia site as a student supervisor this year, said.

All students spent five weeks in the field and are now spending another five weeks in lab analysis at the Illinois State Museum labs in Springfield.

Excavation from the first two summers has netted several thousand pieces to be identified and analyzed. This summer's finds include square-shaped nails dating from the 1880s, pottery shards, bits and pieces of china, a handkerchief clip, foundation stones, the bowl from a clay pipe, a portion of shears, a button from a Civil War uniform and a cup from a child's tea set.

New Philadelphia's population never grew to more than 170 although it was platted with 144 lots and had several businesses, two schools and plans for a seminary.

Dig finds from the site are hoped to provide clues as to how integrated life in a pre-Civil War community flourished.

How was the community's name decided?

Paul Shackel, director of the University of Maryland's Center for Heritage Resource Studies and lead archaeologist for the New Philadelphia project, believes McWorter may have selected the name for the same reason Philadelphia was chosen for the Pennsylvania city.

"Nobody knows for sure. But the name means city of brotherly love and that might have been what he (McWorter) was thinking," Shackel said.

New Philadelphia was a town of working class people. a service community of farm laborers who hired out to landowners in the surrounding areas and where small businesses provided for the needs of neighboring farmers. Oral history accounts indicate that New Philadelphia was as popular a place as any for neighbors in the area to conduct business and from which to hire laborers, but there are post-Civil War oral accounts, too, that may offer hints as to the reason for the town's tapering population toward the end of the 19th Century.

County records show that when the railroad came through the area in 1869, the line was built around New Philadelphia rather than through it. As the town's population dwindled in the years after, the section of railroad that had been built around the community was relocated one half mile closer to the town in 1939.

And there are other accounts of the Ku Klux Klan harassing town residents.

U of I and NSF student teams will return for a third and final year in 2006 for the joint excavation effort.

In the meantime, members of the New Philadelphia Association, a local support group for the project, continue to seek placement on the National Register of Historic Places and explore the possibility of New Philadelphia becoming part of the National Park Service

July 7

A three-member committee of the New Philadelphia Association board met Tuesday, July 5, at the Burdick Center to begin preliminary planning for renovating the 1942 Burdick house as a conference center. There was considerable discussion and a lot of ideas. The house was toured from attic to basement.

The house will be a great place for a conference-visitor's center, with possibilities for housing students of historical archeology. Klingner & Associates of Quincy/Hannibal has offered to contribute some technical assistance and the committee will meet again next week.

July 6

Things are going great this year with the dig. The students (32 of them) finished up their 5 week in depth digs the end of June. They are now in Springfield analyzing and cataloging their finds. They will publish the reports when ready and I will post a link when they are ready.

Last year's reports can be found at: 2004 Archeology Reports


One group of students are doing what are called "shovel tests" on the grounds of the Burdick Center (a house that the New Philadelphia Association is hoping to make into a visitor's center) which is located in New Philadelphia.