Earliest U.S. Black-Founded Town Designated National Historic Site
NEW PHILADELPHIA, Ill.
The site of the first U.S. town founded by an African-American, New Philadelphia, Ill., has been added to the National Register of Historic Places — the nation’s official list of cultural resources worthy of preservation.
A former slave founded New Philadelphia in 1836 as a bi-racial community 25 miles from the slave trade along the Mississippi River. The community survived into the 20th century and an archaeological team is excavating in the 42-acre field where the town once stood.
“New Philadelphia deserves to be part of our national memory, and adding it to the National Register gives the site the federal stamp of approval,” says Paul Shackel, director of the University of Maryland’s Center for Heritage Resource Studies and the archaeologist supervising the excavation. “For a former slave to create a bi-racial community before the Civil War and have it take root is remarkable. When we complete the project, we hope to have a better sense of how well they were able to make the experiment work.”
Shackel serves as the project’s archaeological consultant in association with the University of Illinois, the Illinois State Museum and the non-profit New Philadelphia Association. He led the effort to get the site added to the National Register.
