Free Frank McWorter

Free Frank McWorter was the first black man in the U.S. to design a town and establish a multi-racial community. He did this despite having been born into slavery.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
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 V. Wilson, and I honestly,
Tracy could not tell you how I stumbled across this topic.

(00:21):
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. And I was like, 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, yeah,

(00:42):
I feel like I've had this on my potentials too. Yeah.
So we're talking about free Frank mcwarder, 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

(01:02):
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. So Frank was born
in seventeen seventy seven, so during the Revolutionary War that
was in South Carolina on a plantation near the Palacourt

(01:23):
River that would geographically be in present day Union County.
Frank's 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 a Scott's Irish man named
George mcquarter, was Frank's biological father. There's not a lot

(01:46):
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. Information on his mother, Judah and
what her fate was really doesn't exist. No once Uh,
once Frank's story shifts, Judy gets completely lost in the
historical record because in SEV George mcquarter and just for context,

(02:11):
because there are two different spellings of that name, UH
is M C W H O R T E R.
He purchased a tract of land in Kentucky on the
Green River, and that same year we know that eighteen
year old Frank was also in Kentucky, presumably having been
brought there by mcquarter although there is actually some confusion
in existing histories about whether Frank was sold to someone

(02:34):
in Kentucky or whether he was still with mcgwarder and
used to settle the new land that had been acquired.
I think if you look at the evidence and the
pattern recognition, he was still with George mcquarter uh and
mcquarterer 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

(02:56):
for farming as well. 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 get sound like
they just sort of arrived and we're like, oh, empty land. No.
It definitely definitely was part of that other problematic aspect
of our history of just taking indigenous people's homes. Yeah,

(03:20):
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, UM, which is kind of
outside the scope of this podcast, but uh, it 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 Denham's

(03:42):
daughter was married to George mcquarter'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. She was born in seventeen seventy one. Although
the union had no legal standing, Frank and Lucy mayor
read at least in their own eyes in seventeen ninety nine,

(04:03):
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, and it
came up in one of the biographies of Frank, and

(04:25):
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. Uh
And in eighteen hundred, Frank and Lucy did have their

(04:46):
first child, a daughter, and they named that daughter Judah,
after Frank's mother. George mcwardur hired Frank out to other
landowners in Kentucky who needed labor on their own properties
and their own farms. And at this point in history,
this rough area of Kentucky wasn't populated with many people
who had their own enslaved workforce. In eighteen hundred, the

(05:08):
reported numbers were a hundred and seventy nine thousand, eight
hundred seventy three white residents in Kentucky and forty thousand,
three hundred forty three enslaved people. In Pulaski County, where
mcquarter's property was, there were two thousand, nine hundred twenty
eight white residents on record and two hundred thirty two
enslaved people. And that meant that a strong young man

(05:29):
like Frank was really in demand as rented labor and
as a consistent revenue stream. Form AC quarter 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 um as well as other people. But it
is interesting and I think those those numbers when you

(05:51):
get to Pulaski County being so small, you realized that
this really was an area that was not heavily populated
all at the time. At some point in the early
eighteen hundreds, Frank made an arrangement with mcgwarder that Frank
could hire himself out as a laborer in his limited
free time, So that meant that Frank could make his

(06:12):
own money, but as part of the arrangement, it also
meant that he had to pay an annual fee to
mcwarder for allowing him to do so. 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 still needed a lot
of labor because there were still a lot of white

(06:34):
people moving in and trying to set up farms, Frank
always had work in This arrangement actually would have been illegal,
but in eighteen o two, Kentucky law changed to allow
the direct hire of an enslaved person. However, it was
still technically illegal, but both the laborer and the hirer
just had to pay a fine. No one was going
to go to jail over it. This was still even

(06:57):
paying those fines cheaper for these people than hiring free labor.
So it was a popular way for landholders to get
their property cleared and settled and ready for crops. George
mcgorder 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

(07:20):
to Kentucky, he didn't take Frank with him when he
moved to Tennessee, although he was still enslaving Frank. The
mindset of mcgworder 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. Eventually,

(07:42):
mcgwarder 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 mcquarterer properties and on his own sidework.
It's the stable enough situation that George mcquarter clearly did

(08:03):
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 mcwarder knew
that he was probably his biological son and what that was,
but we honestly cannot know. Uh. In the early eighteen hundreds,
the demand for saltpeter was on the rise. It could,

(08:24):
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 Lovoisier episode back
in and Frank was insightful. He saw this rising market,
and he knew that saltpeter was being mined from caves
in the area. So he set up his own small

(08:45):
business as Saltpeter Works, and he worked mcquarter's land during
the day, and he worked in his small business at night,
mining the mineral nighter and then boiling it down to
get the desired sodium nitrate in the War of eighteen
twelve contributed to demand, and Frank was very busy rising
to meet it. Two important things happened in eighteen fifteen

(09:05):
that affected Frank's situation. First, the War of eighteen twelve ended,
although the demand for salt peter didn't drop off immediately.
The second was that George mcquarter died. Now while mcquarter's
children said that George had intended for Frank to be
manumented upon his death, and he had also told Frank
that there had never been any formal will written up

(09:27):
that specifically said that. So mcquarter's airs filed a manumission
document that wasn't really that at all, 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 mcquarter deceased if said negro
gave Abner mcquarter the sum of five hundred dollars as

(09:51):
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 array, basically making
a loophole where he couldn't really be free. They also
didn't think he had nearly enough money to pay that
five hundred dollar fee. Yeah, it's uh. It's interesting because

(10:14):
they did file documentation, which was not always common, but
they also did it in a way that was really
um strictly beneficial to themselves and not upholding what everybody
believed that George mcwarder had actually wanted. But two years
after mcward's death, Frank did buy freedom, although he did

(10:34):
not buy it for himself, but instead for his wife Lucy.
He paid eight hundred dollars so that she could be
free first. That was considered a very large sum. In
the seventeen years since they had declared themselves husband and wife,
Lucy and Frank had had thirteen 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

(10:57):
not be born into slavery, 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 eighteen seventeen, but when their son,
Squire was born in September of that year, he was
born a freeman. That eight hundred dollars paid to William

(11:19):
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.
In a moment, we will talk about how life for
Frank and Lucy changed after Lucy's freedom had been bought. First,
we're going to pause for a quick sponsor break. The

(11:46):
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, as a freewoman,
could legally do things that Frank could not, even she
was a woman, and she was just as enterprising as
her husband. Because the area of Kentucky where they lived

(12:07):
and worked for decades was still considered frontier, enslaved 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,

(12:28):
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 saltpeter on the side, and the
two of them saved as much as they could with
the intent of expanding their families freedom. Two years after
Lucy became a free woman, Frank purchased his own freedom.

(12:49):
Mcward family demanded an additional three hundred dollars on top
of the five hundred dollars that they had stipulated in
their manumission documents. In eighteen twenty, on a federal insis 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 in

(13:11):
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 freeman. We have talked in other episodes
of the show about laws that encouraged basically the kidnapping
of of free black people, whether they had ever been

(13:33):
enslaved or not, to 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

(13:55):
to speculation that Frank might have more money, which led
to one of Denim's to Chldren, attempting to sue the
couple in eighty three, after William Denham had died. The
suit was for the sum of two hundred twelve dollars,
which William's descendant, Obadiah Denham, claimed had been loaned to
the couple in the years between when Lucy became a
free woman and when they purchased Frank's freedom. The couple

(14:18):
took the tech of not denying it because they knew
that would not work, so instead they pled that Lucy,
under the law of fem coucher, 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. She's a pretty

(14:40):
ingenious approach to defense. This case bounced around through a
number of courts. 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 back woman could be considered legally married even if

(15:03):
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. It also established that the
civil obligations of transferred responsibility associated with fem coverture could
be applied to free black women in this kind of

(15:24):
a situation. Also, just for clarity, you will also just
hear that kind of adapted that phrase to coverture when
we had Stephanie Jones Rodgers 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. Another factor in this case was that one

(15:46):
of their sons, who was called Young Frank, was enslaved
at the time by Obadiah Denim, having been born when
Lucy was still considered the Denim's property, and Denim had
threatened that he would sell the twenty one year old
Young Rank 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

(16:09):
man gone, Denham had lost his most significant intimidation tactic. Incidentally,
five years later, Free Frank traded his Saltpeter operation to
Obadiah Denim in exchange for menu mission for Young Frank,
so that transaction giving up his Salt Peter business was
not a move of desperation. It was one of so
many actions that Free Frank had taken as part of

(16:31):
a much larger plan. As the eighteen twenties 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.

(16:53):
They were growing up in a place where their future
was precarious at best, and even as a freeman, Frank
knew that his own future was justice 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 Saltpeter had dropped off. Frank had wisely

(17:17):
diversified his income streams, and he made money through farming
and land speculation. But he really knew those sources of
money we're going to get tighter and tighter. Frank and
Lucy did not hide their intentions to leave Pulaski County.
They started telling people quite a while in advance, and
this was in part to protect their children who remained

(17:37):
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, Judas, Sally, and Solomon
could potentially be sold to someone else, and that they

(17:58):
would then lose track of them. 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 attractive

(18:22):
land in Pike County long before he left for Illinois.
He made a trade or sale deal with a doctor
Elliott there, and this deal free Frank got a hundred
and sixty acres of Illinois land, and in exchange, Dr
Elliott got a parcel of Frank's land in Kentucky plus
two hundred dollars. This was again all very transparent to everyone,

(18:44):
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. All, they sold off his
remaining assets in Kentucky for the money that he would
need to get his new property up and running and

(19:06):
productive as a farm. All of this prep to move
to Illinois was in line with the way that Frank
tended to live and plan anyway, 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 one thousand dollars. That payment was intended to ensure

(19:29):
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 from mcward's family to meet these requirements. Yeah,
these kinds of requirements were not unique to Illinois, and
folks are wondering um He also had a written character

(19:50):
references prepared, another requirement that had been added to the
list for entry and to Illinois. Frank's official character document
was stated September seven thirty and signed by nineteen residents
of Pulaski County. It reads, in part quote, whereas free Frank,
a man of color, intends leaving this state and we're
moving to the state of Illinois. We therefore state that

(20:11):
we have known Frank for many years, some of us
upwards of twenty years, and that he has always been
an honest, industrious man, punctual to his word in all
of his dealings. 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. So in the fall

(20:35):
of eighteen thirty, Frank, Lucy, and their freeborn children, Squire
Commodore and Lucy Anne, moved to Illinois in covered wagons
loaded with farming tools to start a new life. Free
Frank was fifty three at this time and Lucy was
fifty nine, and their freed son, Young Frank, had returned
to Kentucky from Canada after Free Frank had obtained his

(20:56):
manumission documentation, and he got things ready and moved with
them as well. 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 ferryman on a river where if they
drove through the wrong area, Free Frank and his family

(21:16):
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 free states. Yeah, this is a

(21:36):
good time for an aside. Free states were not really free.
The divide between states where slavery was legal and states
where it was not is often kind of simplified in
a way that makes it easy to think of free
states is 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

(21:58):
and enslaved once again, but they also still lived twenty
miles from a slave state, 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. The
eighteen eighteen Illinois Constitution forbade black men from voting, from

(22:20):
serving in the militia, from serving as surers, 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,

(22:40):
the state supported the ideology of the American Colonization Society,
which wanted to resettle free black people in Africa. This
was yet another tactic intended to curtail black immigration and
settlement in the state. 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

(23:03):
going to talk about how things played out once he
and the family got there. After we paused for a
word from our sponsors. When Free Frank arrived in Illinois
with the intent to settle in Hadley Township, he first
went to the Pike County Clerk to file all of

(23:25):
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,

(23:45):
they just focused on subsistence farming and storing enough food
to get them through the next winter, and then they
started focusing on cash farming. In the following years, Lucy
and Frank, who were Baptists, found a certain degree of
social and religious access updance from some of the neighboring
white farmers through their regular attendance of services at one
of the settlers homes nearby. Free Frank was, as has

(24:09):
been obvious, enterprising. In eighteen thirty four, he realized that
there was a need for a road to Atlas to
the west so that produce and livestock could be shipped
along the river, so he started clearing one himself. Once
he had the road cleared, all the farmers started to
use it. In eighteen thirty six, the State Act was
passed to complete the road and make it a public highway.

(24:31):
In eighteen thirty five, 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 and
Lucy had been afraid of, but Free Frank was able
to locate the purchaser who lived nearby, and he was

(24:51):
able to convince him to let him secure his son's
freedom for the price of five fifty dollars. Also in
eighteen thirty five, Free franc A quired 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

(25:12):
Solomon for 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 would become significant as his landholdings grew
and Free Frank worked to establish himself and his family
in their new state. He became aware that it was

(25:33):
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
eighteen thirty six, he petitioned to have his name legally
changed to Frank mcwarder. In this case, he left the
H out of that last name. That's a variation on
the spelling of the person who had enslaved him. There

(25:57):
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, we're
Frank's legal desires. As soon as the name change was complete,
Frank mcgworder made a second petition to request that he'd
be given additional legal rights, including the right to purchase
property in that name and to participate in legal actions.

(26:20):
The State of Illinois General Assembly approved the petitions, and
he went from free Frank to Frank mcgworder, and all
of his children were given that last name as well,
and his legal rights as a free black man expanded considerably.
In eighteen thirty six, after his name changed, Frank mcwarter
submitted a platte for a new township on the land

(26:41):
he had purchased from the government, and that was where
he founded New Philadelphia. The town plaque that he registered
with the state featured a hundred and forty four plots
with a connected roadway system, and starting in April of
eighteen thirty seven, the lots of New Philadelphia began to sell,
and the purchasers of those laws were a mix of
black and white. New Philadelphia was the first town in

(27:04):
the US planned 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, Frank once again looked
to the future in terms of ensuring his family's welfare.

(27:25):
He wanted to make sure that if anything happened to him,
Lucy would be protected and could inherit his land. So
in eighteen thirty nine, 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

(27:47):
your soul. I've done that for the last forty years.
The sweetest thing uh 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. It was in a state of conflict between
pro slavery factions and abolitionists. Even so, New Philadelphia, still

(28:08):
a small farming community, made it through the war and
saw a bit of a surgeon residence. After emancipation in
eighteen sixty five, the town was at its largest, with
one hundred sixty residents and a variety of small businesses.
The promise of a railroad in Pike County, Illinois, offered
hopes for even greater prosperity, but when the rail line

(28:30):
was laid at the end of the eighteen sixties, 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 nineteenth century progressed, and by
the middle of the eighteen eighties there weren't many members
of the village left. In the half century from eighteen

(28:51):
ninety to nineteen forty, New Philadelphia really vanished into history,
as abandoned buildings spelled down and wild native flora grew
over the cross and the roads. Frank had lived in
New Philadelphia for the remainder of his life until he
died on September seven, eighteen fifty four. Throughout the years
from eighteen seventeen to eighteen fifty seven, Frank mcwardo worked

(29:13):
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 will explain Ultimately he
had personally purchased the freedom of nine people, including Lucy
and himself, and this included grandchildren that his daughters had
while they were enslaved. Judah, Lucy and Frank's oldest daughter,

(29:34):
was finally freed when she was fifty, 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 uh in those three years after his

(29:54):
death and over the years, the general tally is that
the family's freedom had cost thousand dollars again in eighteen fifties. Total.
That is a great deal more today. In recent years,
New Philadelphia has been the focus of ongoing archaeological projects
and efforts to have it recognized for its historical significance.

(30:15):
Frank and Lucy mcwarter's descendants have been involved in those efforts,
ensuring that the family's history is part of that discussion,
and New Philadelphia was listed on the National Register of
Historic Places in two thousand five. In two thousand nine,
it was designated a National Historic Landmark. The National Park
Service made it part of their National Underground Railroad Network

(30:37):
to Freedom program in ten and it is believed to
have been part of that network, but national park status
for the site has remained elusive. In 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 opportunity

(31:00):
used 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 nonprofit efforts to continue to preserve and interpret the
story of New Philadelphia. Free Frank, Yeah, and they're really
cool legacy. Yeah. I love that story. It's one of

(31:23):
those things where, um, on the one hand, you wanna
find it uplifting and amazing, and on the other you're
like this person had to do so much to to
get to like level. Yeah. Well, and it it illustrates
for me that there were a lot of different ways
that enslaved people resisted what was happening. Like, uh, we

(31:49):
have talked about a lot of different things on the
show about people um escaping from slavery, about people liberating
themselves from slavery, about slave uprisings, like a a lot
of different ways um 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

(32:11):
much to free himself and his family, 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 uh, like
it's that has come up on the show before. I
feel like it came up in the Frederick Douglas episode,
but I could be misremembering um that Like like that

(32:33):
that was criticized sometimes within abolitionist communities of like why
are you why are you buying into this in order
to free your family because it was like it was complicated,
that was the option that he had. Yeah, yeah, Um,
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. UM. I

(32:58):
have a very briefless their mail. Uh. 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,
and he writes, thank you for two things. One for
doing a segment on the public universal friend a personage
who mostly turns up an anecdotal history books such as
those by Carl Karmer, or we get a picture of
someone vague and eccentric driving about in a moon shaped carriage. Uh.

(33:22):
And then two for to mon Bay 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 character is to be trusted or to
be underestimated. Keep up the very fine work, Eric, and
I mostly wanted to do this to say, like, uh
for two Monbai, don't don't thank me except unless you're

(33:44):
thanking me for bringing it to your attention, because I
think I technically have a credit on it that show
under the I Heart distribution. But that is all John
Dryden's work and his amazing team, so they put together
something early special there. If you have not checked it out,
you should do it um. If you would like to
write to us, you should also do that. You can
do that at History Podcast at iHeart radio dot com.

(34:06):
You can also find us on social media as Missed
in History. If you would like to subscribe to the podcast,
it is easy, Peasy, rice and Cheesy, you can do
that on the I heart Radio app, at Apple podcast
or wherever it is you listen. Stuff you Missed in
History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For
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(34:28):
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
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