Just when Free Frank McWorter is finally poised to take his place alongside Harriet Tubman and other pre-Civil War heroes, the nation is embroiled in an attack on African American history.
McWorter was the first Black man to found a town in America, New Philadelphia, which has just become the country’s 424th national park.
McWorter was an entrepreneurial enslaved man in Kentucky who bought his and his pregnant wife’s freedom by selling saltpeter, a component of gunpowder, and buying land in the free state of Illinois. By 1836, Free Frank, as he was called, owned 600 acres of farmland a few miles from Barry in Pike County. He platted and sold the land to Black and white Americans in order to purchase freedom for 16 other family members.
