Integrated town that predates Civil War earns landmark status

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – A remote western Illinois field could someday yield tourists instead of crops, adding to the state's legacy of racial equality that already includes Abraham Lincoln and the nation's first black president.

Once an integrated town that flourished decades before the Civil War broke the grip of slavery, the lost community's potential as a heritage attraction got a boost last week when it was designated a National Historic Landmark by U.S. Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne.

Landmark status puts New Philadelphia among a select group of sites deemed vital in interpreting the nation's heritage and history. While more than 80,000 sites are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, fewer than 2,500 have been named landmarks.

Achieving the nation's top historic designation should aid fundraising efforts to continue archaeological research of the now-buried town and could ultimately help make New Philadelphia a popular historic destination, said Christopher Fennell, a University of Illinois archaeologist and principal investigator for an ongoing dig on the 42-acre site near Barry, about 85 miles northeast of St. Louis.

"The landmark designation doesn't provide funding in itself, but makes it more likely," Fennell said. "It provides the highest historic recognition, which can be used to raise funds that will conserve the property and help develop plans to present it to the public."

View an audio slide show about the archaeological work done at New Philadelphia, a lost western Illinois town where blacks and whites lived together in peace and freedom a quarter of a century before the Civilk War broke the grip of slavery.

Five years of excavations have unearthed more than 85,000 artifacts and remains of 14 buildings from New Philadelphia, the first known U.S. town planned and legally registered by a black man.

Founded in 1836 by freed slave Frank McWorter, the frontier town nestled between the Mississippi and Illinois rivers grew to about 160 people – a third black and two-thirds white – before it began to slowly fade away when it was bypassed by the railroad in 1869.