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It's no secret that in Washington, D.C., corruption is everywhere, and I should know my mom's the speaker of the House, my friends are all in the same boat, daughters of the D.C. elite. When you're this close to power, there's nowhere to hide.

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But in here, no one knows me as James Parker. They only know me as storm alloy. You see, I'm a bit of a hacker. Join me and my friends. Four daughters in D.C., a new 12 part scripted podcast, political thriller from the team that brought you Lethal It Einhorn's Epic Productions and I Heart Radio. Listen to Dogs for Free and I heart radio, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Feeling lost, and we've got the podcast for you, Laborites.

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I'm Christopher Robinson. And I'm Amanda Knox. I know what it's like to be stuck to wind up in a life I never expected. But your days might be a cruise ship or your Midnighter a terrorist husband. So get lost. With us starting October 16th, as we step into the personal labyrinths of people like Andrew Yang, LeVar Burton and Malcolm Gladwell, listen to Labyrinths on the I Heart radio app, on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class A production of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry. And I'm Tracy Wilson. And I honestly, Tracy could not tell you how I stumbled across this topic.

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It's another one of those cases where I found it scrawled in a notebook and went, I should look that up and see what that was. I was like, oh, heavens, I should have done this forever ago. Well, and it's it's something that when you mentioned to me a couple of weeks ago that you were thinking about it, I was like, that name rings a strange bell that I can't quite place. And then Googled and went, Oh, right.

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Yeah, I feel like I've had this on my potentials, too. Yeah.

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So we're talking about free Frank McWhirter and his story is a really unique one because he was the first black man in the United States to design a town and plot it and establish a multiracial community there. And he did this despite having been born into slavery. And his story is one of remarkable perseverance and diligence, both before and after he became a free man. Frank had to work with incredible forethought and purpose to realize his goals for himself and his family.

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So Frank was born in 1777. So during the Revolutionary War, that was in South Carolina on a plantation near the river that would geographically be in present day Union County. Franks mother, Judah, was an enslaved woman who had been kidnapped and taken from her home in West Africa. So Frank was born enslaved. It's believed that the white owner of this plantation, who was the Scots Irish man named George McWhorter, was Frank's biological father. There's not a lot of documentation regarding Frank's childhood, although he presumably was working with all the other enslaved people on this plantation from a really young age.

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Information on his mother, Juda, and what her fate was really doesn't exist. No.

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Once once Frank's story shifts, Judy gets completely lost in the historical record because in 1795, George McWhorter and just for context, because there are two different spellings of that name is M.C. w h o RTR.

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He purchased attractive land in Kentucky on the Green River. And that same year we know that 18 year old Frank was also in Kentucky, presumably having been brought there by McWhirter, although there is actually some confusion in existing histories about whether Frank was sold to someone in Kentucky or whether he was still with McWhirter and used to settle the new land that had been acquired. I think if you look at the evidence in the pattern recognition, he was still with George McWhirter and McWhirter had four enslaved people that were doing this work, and he was then able to purchase additional land in the following years using that slave labor to settle it for farming as well.

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And just to be clear, this was not land that was just vacant waiting for white people. This was indigenous land that had been seeded through treaties or otherwise taken. I don't want to sound like they just sort of arrived and were like, oh, empty land. No, it definitely, definitely was part of that other problematic aspect of our history of just taking indigenous peoples homes. Yeah, I went down a whole huge rabbit hole when I was first reading through this, like about the history of of land rights in Kentucky, which is kind of outside the scope of this podcast.

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But, uh, was really interesting at the same time. So the first year that Frank was in Kentucky, he met an enslaved woman named Lucy, who was enslaved by William Denham, and then his daughter was married to George McWhorter's brother. And that connection between the two families is how Frank and Lucy came to know one another. Like Frank, Lucy had been born into slavery.

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She was born in 1771, although the union had no legal standing. Frank and Lucy married, at least in their own eyes, in 1799. And by all accounts, they were deeply in love and incredibly devoted to one another, although they were, of course, not allowed to live together due to their enslaved status with two separate families. One of the things that we do not often discuss on the show is how people who enslaved other people felt about these marriages.

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And it came up in one of the the biographies of Frank and I thought was interesting to discuss, because in short, they kind of viewed it as a way to expand their property holdings, particularly for the person who claimed ownership of a woman who was enslaved. This could be viewed as lucrative because her children would automatically become their property.

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And in 1900, Frank and Lucy did have their first child, a daughter, and they named that daughter Judah, after Frank's mother, George McWhirter, hired Frank out to other landowners in Kentucky who needed labor on their own properties and their own farms. Then at this point in history, this rough area of Kentucky wasn't populated with many people who had their own enslaved workforce. In 1800, the reported numbers were 107. Nine thousand 873 white residents in Kentucky and forty thousand three hundred forty three enslaved people in Pulaski County where McWhorter's property was, there were two thousand nine hundred twenty eight white residents on record and 232 enslaved people.

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And that meant that a strong young man like Frank was really in demand as rancid labor and as a consistent revenue stream for McWhirter, who kept purchasing hundreds and hundreds of acres of land at a time. Yeah, using the money that he was making, renting Frank out as labor as well as other people.

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But it is interesting and I think those those numbers, when you get to Polaski County being so small, you realize that this really was an area that was not heavily populated at all at the time. At some point in the early 1800, Frank made an arrangement with McWhirter that Frank could hire himself out as a laborer in his limited free time. So that meant that Frank could make his own money. But as part of the arrangement, it also meant that he had to pay an annual fee to McWhirter for allowing him to do so.

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And in some cases, people who owned enslaved people made more money from these monthly payments than they did hiring out their enslaved workforce themselves. And since the area is still needed, a lot of labor because there were still a lot of white people moving in and trying to set up farms, Frank always had work in seventeen ninety eight. This arrangement actually would have been illegal. But in 1892, Kentucky law changed to allow the direct hire of an enslaved person.

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However, it was still technically illegal, but both the labor and the hirer just had to pay a fine.

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No one was going to go to jail over it. This was still even paying those fines cheaper for these people than hiring free labor. So it was a popular way for land holders to get their property cleared and settled and ready for crops.

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George McWhorter didn't stay in the same place for long. He moved from his initial Pulaski County, Kentucky, homestead to another one in Wayne County, and then he moved to Tennessee. But unlike when he made the move from South Carolina to Kentucky, he didn't take Frank with him when he moved to Tennessee, although he was still enslaving Frank. The mindset of McWhorter and all this is really not known. But one avenue of speculation is that he knew Frank wouldn't try to escape and leave his family behind, and so he trusted him to take care of his property.

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Eventually, McWhirter was aware that Frank had a plan of saving up to purchase his family's freedom. And he probably thought that Frank would never actually accomplish this task. But keeping that hope alive for him meant that Frank would keep working both on the McWhirter properties and on his own side work the stable enough situation that George McWhirter clearly did not think it was much of a gamble to leave Frank behind. Yeah, there is a lot of speculation about their relationship and what it was and whether McWhirter knew that he was probably his biological son and what that was.

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But we honestly cannot know. In the early eighteen hundreds, the demand for saltpetre was on the rise. It could, of course, be used for a number of things, but had become particularly important in the manufacture of gunpowder. That's something we talked about in our Antoine Lavoisier episode back in 2014. And Frank was insightful. He saw this rising market and he knew that saltpetre was being mined from caves in the area. So he set up his own small business, a saltpetre works.

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And he worked McWhorter's land during the day and he worked in his small business at night, mining the mineral Nitra and then boiling it down to get the desired sodium nitrate in the War of 1812 contributed to demand. And Frank was a very busy rising to meet it.

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Two important things happened in 1815 that affected Frank's situation. First, the War of 1812 ended, although the demand for saltpetre didn't drop off immediately. The second was that George McWhirter died. Now, while McWhorter's children said that George had intended for Frank to be manumitted upon his death. And he had also told Frank that there had never been any formal will written up that specifically said that. So McWhorter's heirs filed a manumission document that wasn't really that at all.

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It stated that they intended to, quote, set at liberty and give freedom to a Negro slave named Frank in the state of Kentucky late the property of George McWhirter deceased. If said Negro gave Abner McWhorter the sum of five hundred dollars is the price of his freedom. But that same document said that they also wanted him to keep tending the farm in Kentucky as a condition of this arrangement, basically making a loophole where he couldn't really be free. They also didn't think he had nearly enough money to pay that 500 dollar fee.

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Yeah. It's interesting because they did file documentation, which was not always common, but they also did it in a way that was really strictly beneficial to themselves and not upholding what everybody believed that George McWhirter had actually wanted.

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But two years after McWhorter's death, Frank did buy freedom, although he did not buy it for himself, but instead for his wife, Lucy. He paid 800 dollars so that she could be free first. That was considered a very large sum in the 17 years since they had declared themselves husband and wife, Lucy and Frank had had 13 children together, although only four of those children had survived to adulthood. In freeing Lucy, Frank was ensuring that any future children they had would not be born into slavery.

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And this was actually a rather urgent matter for the couple because Lucy was pregnant at the time. Now it is unclear if anyone outside of Lucy and Frank knew this information when the transaction took place in April 1817. But when their son Squire was born in September of that year, he was born a free man. That eight hundred dollars paid to William Denham for Lucy's release, which, as I said, was considered a very high amount, has led to speculation that Denham may have actually been aware that Lucy was carrying a child.

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In a moment, we will talk about how life for Frank and Lucy changed after Lucy's freedom had been bought. First, we are going to pause for a quick response to break. Hey, it's Bobby Bones, executive producer of Make It Up as we Go, the brand new podcast from Audio Up and I Heart Radio brought to you exclusively by Unilever's Noor and Magnum Brands. The story follows a songwriter's journey as well as the songs themselves and how they make it to country radio from executive producer Miranda Lambert and creators Scarlett Burg and Jared Goosestep, a story inspired by the competitive world of Nashville writing rooms featuring original music by Scarlett Burke, director and executive producer, featuring some of the biggest names in country, including The Cool Guy and Everything Now Nowadays.

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Everything just is. Now it's feeling like one day on a Saturday night, make it up as we go only on the podcast network in association with audio of media created by Scarlett Burke and Jared Goosestep. The start of a free life for his family meant that even though Frank himself was still enslaved, he had a wider range of options at earning money. Lucy is a free woman, could legally do things that Frank could not, even though she was a woman and she was just as enterprising as her husband, because the area of Kentucky where they lived and worked for decades was still considered frontier enslaved.

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People knew how to do a lot of things. They kind of had to be jack of all trades. And just as Frank could clear land and build houses and farm and mine, among other skills, Lucy had learned to tend fields, but also how to weave and to spin and to knit. And she used those skills to make additional money for the family so she would make handicrafts and sell them, among other things. And she also took in laundry and Frank continued to produce saltpetre on the side.

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And the two of them saved as much as they could with the intent of expanding their family's freedom. Two years after Lucy became a free woman, Frank purchased his own freedom. The McWhirter family demanded an additional three hundred dollars on top of the 500 dollars that they had stipulated in their manumission documents in 1820 on a federal census record. Frank listed himself without a last name, opting instead to be recorded in the ledger as free frank. That was largely a matter of practicality, including the word free, and his name helped to establish to everyone that he was not enslaved and as a measure to help prevent being kidnapped by anybody claiming that they did not know that he was a free man.

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We have talked in other episodes of the show about laws that encouraged basically the kidnapping of free black people, whether they had ever been enslaved or not.

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Your so-called return them to slavery and freedom came with some new problems, particularly because this was still a sparsely populated area. So small town mindset. And it became widely known that Frank had spent a total of sixteen hundred dollars on his and Lucy's freedom in the course of two years. This, of course, led to speculation that Frank might have more money, which led to one of Denham's children attempting to sue the couple in 1823 after William Denham had died.

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The suit was for the sum of 212 dollars, which William's descendant, Obediah Denham, claimed had been loaned to the couple in the years between.

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When Lucy became a free woman and when they purchased Frank's freedom, the couple took the tack of not denying it because they knew that would not work. So instead they pled that Lucy, under the law of couverture, where a woman's legal obligations are automatically transferred to her husband, had no responsibility for such an agreement. And Frank, being enslaved at the time could not enter into any legal contracts. It's a pretty ingenious approach to defense. This case bounced around through a number of courts.

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It went through appeals and then got sent back to lower courts. But ultimately, the ruling was in favor of free Frank. And in some of those documents, his wife is listed as free Lucy. That case was significant in several ways. First, that established that a free black woman could be considered legally married even if her husband was enslaved because she was outside the bounds placed on enslaved people by state law, those laws would have restricted their legal marriage.

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It also established that the civil obligations of transferred responsibility associated with femme couverture could be applied to free black women in this kind of a situation. Also, just for clarity, you will also just hear that kind of adapted that phrase to coverture. When we had Stephanie Jones Rogers on, she used that terminology, but it's the same thing. It is also worth noting that it was intensely brave for this couple to fight this whole thing in court in Kentucky, which was a slave state.

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Another factor in this case was that one of their sons who was called Young Frank, was enslaved at the time by Obediah Denim, having been born when Lucy was still considered the Dunhams property and denim, had threatened that he would sell the 21 year old young Frank as a means of intimidation. However, during all of this case, young Frank was able to make an escape and he fled to Canada. And with the young man gone, Denim had lost his most significant intimidation tactic.

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Incidentally, five years later, Free Frank traded his saltpetre operation to Obediah Denim in exchange for manumission for young Frank.

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So that transaction giving up his saltpetre business was not a move of desperation. It was one of so many actions that Free Frank had taken as part of a much larger plan. As the 18 20 years unfolded, Frank and Lucy had decided that they wanted to leave Kentucky entirely and move their family to a free state. There were multiple. Factors that fed into this decision other than the obvious desire to live outside of a slave state. He and Lucy had three children who had been born free.

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They were growing up in a place where their future was precarious at best. And even as a free man, Frank knew that his own future was just as fragile as Pulaski County had become more populated over the years, the economic opportunities for Frank and Lucy had dwindled. There was more competition. The demand for saltpetre had dropped off. Frank had wisely diversified his income streams, and he made money through farming and land speculation. But he really knew those sources of money were going to get tighter and tighter.

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Frank and Lucy did not hide their intentions to leave Polaski County. They started telling people quite a while in advance, and this was in part to protect their children who remained enslaved in Kentucky. Frank wanted to make it very, very clear to the white people enslaving his family that he had every intention of purchasing his children's freedom. Frank and Lucy were, of course, terrified that something could happen after they moved, that their surviving children, Judah, Sally and Solomon, could potentially be sold to someone else and that they would then lose track of them.

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But their hope was that in making all of these plans openly and being very friendly about it and maintaining assurances that they were going to make enough income in Illinois, where they planned to move to make good on their intentions, that they would give the people who were holding their family members lives in their hands confidence that they had a sure sale in the future. Frank, ever the planner, secured a tract of land in Pike County long before he left for Illinois.

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He made a trade or sale deal with a Dr. Elliot there. In this deal free, Frank got 160 acres of Illinois land. And in exchange, Dr. Elliott got a parcel of Frank's land in Kentucky plus 200 dollars. This was, again, all very transparent to everyone, careful, signaling on Frank's part to the community that he was leaving, that he would be back for his remaining enslaved children and to the community that he was moving to, that he was a man with financial stability who was serious about settling there.

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He also sold off his remaining assets in Kentucky for the money that he would need to get his new property up and running and productive as a farm.

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All of this prep to move to Illinois was in line with the way that Frank tended to live and play in any way, but there were very clear legal reasons for it as well. Illinois required that a free black man moving into the state needed to file their manumission documents and had to pay a bond of 1000 dollars. That payment was intended to ensure that the person would stay out of trouble and would not become a burden to the state and free. Frank was in a fairly unique position to have the financial liquidity and the paperwork for McWhorter's family to meet these requirements.

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These kinds of requirements were not unique to Illinois. Folks are wondering. He also had a written character. References prepared another requirement that had been added to the list for entry into Illinois. Franck's official character document was dated September 7th, 1830, and signed by 19 residents of Pulaski County. It reads in part, quote, Whereas Free Frank, a man of color, intends leaving this state and removing to the state of Illinois. We therefore state that we have known Frank for many years, some of us upwards of 20 years, and that he has always been an honest, industrious man, punctual to his word in all of his dealings.

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The statement also details how Frank worked diligently first to free his wife, then to free himself and states that, quote, Lucy has always sustained a good character as a virtuous, industrious woman.

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So in the fall of 1830, Frank Lucy and their freeborn children, Squire, Commodore and Lucy, and moved to Illinois in covered wagons loaded with farming tools to start a new life free. Frank was 53 at this time and Lucy was 59. And they are Friedson Young. Frank had returned to Kentucky from Canada after free. Frank had obtained his manumission documentation and he got things ready and moved with them as well.

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This entire trip had to be so thoughtfully planned. A black family traveling by wagon from Kentucky to Illinois would just not be safe if they had trusted the wrong ferrymen on a river or if they drove through the wrong area free. Frank and his family could very well have been enslaved again. Aside from that, there was the real threat of bandits and they had to survive during this journey over the course of a winter, even after they arrived, after months of traveling, they would still have to settle the land and faced racism that was still pervasive in four states.

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You know, this is a good time for inside. Free states are not really free of the divide between states where slavery was legal in. States where it was not is often kind of simplified in a way that makes it easy to think of free states as more welcoming to black people than they were in moving to Illinois free Frank and his family may have had a reduced chance of being captured and kidnapped and enslaved once again, but they also still lived 20 miles from a slave state.

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And it was very, very common for black people to be captured in free states and taken to slave states. And even aside from that very real danger free, Frank did not have much in the way of rights when he moved to Illinois.

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The 1818 Illinois Constitution forbade black men from voting, from serving in the militia, from serving as jurors, from testifying in court cases against white people and from having access to public education. And then there were all those requirements we mentioned just a short while ago, which were specifically designed to keep free black people from moving into the state. Additionally, the state supported the ideology of the American Colonization Society, which wanted to resettle free black people in Africa. This is yet another tactic intended to curtail black emigration and settlement in the state.

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But despite all of those barriers, Frank had seen the potential to acquire property and build a life in Illinois. And he was undaunted. And we're going to talk about how things played out once he and the family got there after we pause for a word from our sponsors. Winfrey Frank arrived in Illinois with the intent to settle in Hadley Township.

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He first went to the Pike County clerk to file all of that required paperwork. And in free Frank's case, he was expected because his land purchase had already been recorded. So they knew that he and his family was coming. And then the entire Frank family put all of the experience they had from settling farms for their white enslavers to work, getting their own farm in order in the first year. They just focused on subsistence farming and storing enough food to get them through the next winter.

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And then they started focusing on cash farming. In the following years, Lucy and Frank, who were Baptiste's, found a certain degree of social and religious acceptance from some of the neighboring white farmers through their regular attendance of services at one of the settler homes nearby.

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Free Frank was, as has been obvious, enterprising and 1834 he realized that there was a need for a road to Atlus to the West so that produce and livestock could be shipped along the river. So you started clearing one himself. Once he had the road cleared, all the farmers started to use it. In 1836, the state act was passed to complete the road and make it a public highway in 1835.

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In the midst of all of that, Frank made a return trip to Kentucky, having saved up enough money to purchase the freedom of his son, Solomon. But when he got to Pulaski County, he discovered that Solomon had been sold. One of the things he annelies he had been afraid of but free Frank was able to locate the purchaser who lived nearby, and he was able to convince him to let him secure his son's freedom for the price of five hundred fifty dollars.

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Also in 1835, Free Frank acquired a plot of land from the federal government for a hundred dollars that was eighty acres in size. While he planned to continue to make land investments, his biggest priority had been freeing Solomon from using his money. And he continued for years to balance the goals of freeing his remaining family members and ensuring that he was building a life and a home for them once they were free. But that particular plot of land will become significant.

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As his land holdings grew and free, Frank worked to establish himself and his family in their new state. He became aware that it was going to be really beneficial to him if he could adopt a legal surname as a means of ensuring that no one could question the deeds on any of his property or any other of his legal dealings. So in 1836, he petitioned to have his name legally changed to Frank McWhorter. In this case, he left the H out of that last name.

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It's a variation on the spelling of the person who had enslaved him. There has been so much speculation over this choice, but there is no real record of Frank's actual line of thought. And what led him to that decision. Clearer, though, where Frank's legal desires. As soon as the name change was complete, Frank McWhirter made a second petition to request that he be given additional legal rights, including the right to purchase property in that name and to participate in legal actions.

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The state of Illinois General Assembly approved the petitions and he went from free Frank to Frank McWhirter and all of his children were given that last name as well. And his legal rights as a free black man expanded considerably in 1836.

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After his name change, Frank McWhorter submitted a plot for a new township on the land he had purchased from the government. And that was where he founded New Philadelphia. The town plaque that he registered with the state featured 144 plots with a connected roadway system.

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And starting in April of 1837, the lots of new Philadelphia began to sell. And the purchasers of those lots were a mix of black and white. New Philadelphia was the first town in the U.S. plan and established by a black man. And as it developed, it was integrated with black and white residents living side by side and the children all attending one school. It was not entirely integrated. The cemeteries were still segregated as the town grew.

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Frank once again looked to the future in terms of ensuring his family's welfare. He wanted to make sure that if anything happened to him, Lucy would be protected and could inherit his land. So in 1839, Frank and Lucy were finally legally married under Illinois state law in an actual formal ceremony. When Frank was asked during the ceremony if he would love, cherish and support his bride, he replied, Why, God bless your soul. I've done that for the last 40 years.

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The sweetest thing new Philadelphia continued to grow in the years leading up to the Civil War, though the region on that border of Illinois in the slave state of Missouri was in a state of conflict between pro slavery factions and abolitionists. Even so, New Philadelphia, still a small farming community, made it through the war and saw a bit of a surge in residents after emancipation. In 1865, the town was at its largest with 160 residents and a variety of small businesses, the promise of a railroad and Pike County, Illinois, offered hopes for even greater prosperity.

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But when the rail line was laid at the end of the 1960s, it bypassed new Philadelphia. While many households hung on there, this ultimately doomed the small town. It just was obsolete. New Philadelphia slowly declined as the 19th century progressed. And by the middle of the 1980s, there weren't many members of the village left in the half century. From 1890 to 1940, New Philadelphia really vanished into history as abandoned buildings fell down and wild native flora grew over the crops and the roads.

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Frank had lived in New Philadelphia for the remainder of his life until he died on September 7th, 1854. Throughout the years from 1817 to 1857, Frank McWhorter worked tirelessly to keep his family together and to free the ones who had been enslaved. You'll notice that's three years past when he died, but we'll explain. Ultimately, he had personally purchased the freedom of nine people, including Lucien himself, and this included grandchildren that his daughters had while they were enslaved.

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Judah Lucien, Frank's oldest daughter, was finally freed when she was 50. But even after he died, Frank's family continued his efforts to free the entire family. Seven more people, Frank and Lucy's grandchildren and great grandchildren, were freed with the money that he had left behind and from sales of land that he had left his children in those three years after his death. And over the years, the general tally is that the family's freedom had cost fourteen thousand dollars again in 1850 total.

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That is a great deal more today.

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In recent years, New Philadelphia has been the focus of ongoing archaeological projects and efforts to have it recognized for its historical significance. Frank and Lucy McWhorter's descendants have been involved in those efforts, ensuring that the family's history is part of that discussion and knew Philadelphia was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2005. In 2009, it was designated a national historic landmark. The National Park Service made it part of their National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom Program in 2013, and it is believed to have been part of that network.

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But national park status for the site has remained elusive. In 2012, a preliminary reconnaissance survey of New Philadelphia was conducted by the National Park Service, and their recommendation was that the site had issues of feasibility for needed staffing and also creating, quote, opportunities for public enjoyment at the site. Although it was also noted that the site holds special meaning for people. So it should be supported through, quote, local, state and or non-profit efforts to continue to preserve and interpret the story of New Philadelphia free Frank.

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Yeah, the really cool legacy. Yeah, I love that story. It's one of those things where on the one hand you want to find it uplifting and amazing, and on the other you're like this person had to do so much to to get to lake level. Yeah.

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Well it, it, it illustrates for me that there were a lot of different ways that enslaved people resisted. What was happening like we have talked about a lot of different things on the show about people escaping from slavery, about people liberating themselves from slavery, about slave uprisings, like a whole lot of different ways to resist and to have agency. And this is one of the examples of how that could be really complicated, because, like Frank was doing so much to free himself and his family.

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But in order to do that, like he kind of had to buy into the system, like he had to pay money into the system that was enslaving him, which is like that has come up on the show before. I feel like it came up in the Frederick Douglass episode. But I could be misremembering that like like that that was criticized sometimes within abolitionist communities of like, why are you why are you buying into this in order to free your family?

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Because it was like it was complicated. That was the option that he had. Yeah.

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Yeah. I'm kind of bummed it's not a national park, but you never know. I suppose it could happen in the future. But I'm I'm not I'm not expecting it.

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I have a very brief listener mail.

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This is from our listener, Eric, and it refers to both episodes that you've done the research on and one that I worked on. He writes, Thank you for two things.

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One, for doing a segment on the public universal friend, a personage who mostly turns up in anecdotal history books such as Those by Karl Kharma, where we get a picture of someone vague and eccentric driving about in a moon shaped carriage and then two four to Monday. Marvelous. I have been three seasons and have found that Season four is currently streaming on the BBC. The Game of Thrones comparison is apt. No characters to be trusted or to be underestimated.

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Keep up the very fine work. Eric and I mostly wanted to do this to say like four to my baby.

[00:36:00]

Don't don't thank me, except unless you're thanking me for bringing it to your attention, because I think I technically have a credit on that show under the I heart distribution. But that is all Jon Dryden's work and his amazing team. So they put together something really special there.

[00:36:15]

If you've not checked it out, you should do it. But if you would like to write to us, you should also do that. You could do that at History podcast it I heart radio dotcom. You can also find us on social media as missed in history. We would like to subscribe to the podcast. It is easy peasy race. And Cheezy, you can do that on the I Heart radio app at Apple podcast or wherever it is you listen.

[00:36:39]

Stuff you missed in history class is the production of I Heart Radio for more podcasts from my heart radio music by her radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.