In commemoration of African-American History Month, members of the McWorter family, other descendant family members, and members of the local community, gathered at the Lincoln Presidential Library on February 28, 2008, to present the Library with a bronze bust of Frank McWorter, sculpted by Shirley McWorter Moss, and a bound, eleven-volume set of archival papers and archaeology reports. Shirley McWorter Moss, Sandra McWorter, Allen Kirkpatrick, Kathryn Harris, Janet Davies, Anna Agbe-Davies, and Terry Martin, among others, spoke at the gathering.

Frank McWorter, founder of New Philadelphia, Illinois. Sculpture by Shirley McWorter Moss on display at the Lincoln Presidential Library, Springfield (Photo courtesy of Sandra McWorter and Lincoln Pres. Library).

In early January, 2008, we received funding from the National Science Foundation's Research Experiences for Undergraduates program for another three years of field school research at New Philadelphia, which is planned to start in the summer of 2008. The daily archaeological work in this field school will be co-directed by Anna Agbe-Davies (DePaul University), Terry Martin (Illinois State Museum), and Chris Fennell (U. Illinois). The University of Illinois will administer the funding.

In addition to the ten-week field school, running from May 27 through August 1, 2008, there will be a series of public speakers and audience discussions on the subjects of African-American Heritage in the Midwest, including talks by David Gradwohl, Paul Shackel, Abdul Alkalimat (Gerald McWorter), Timothy Baumann, Paul Mullins, Flordeliz Bugarin, and Kamau Kemayo. For schedule information, please see the online program for these events.

Other planned projects in 2008 include continuing work towards nominating the New Philadelphia town site and nearby features of the cultural landscape for National Landmark status, an effort headed up by Charlotte King and Paul Shackel, Director for the Center of Heritage Studies at the University of Maryland. Ms. King has also authored an excellent lesson plan based on the history of New Philadelphia as part of the National Park Service's Teaching with Historic Places program. Graduate students at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign are working with Chris Fennell to enhance our mapping and landscape studies of the town site and surrounding area, and to expand our analysis of archival data from nineteenth century newspapers published in the region. Terry Martin and his colleagues at the Illinois State Museum continue their work of analyzing artifacts and faunal remains excavated at the town site.

We are now working on publishing a collection of articles in a specially edited issue of a peer-review journal and are at work on other articles and books. Our findings and interpretations to date are currently scheduled to be published in an official monograph series reviewed and published by the Illinois State Museum. This publication series, entitled the Illinois State Museum Reports of Investigations, utilizes ISM and external peer reviewers, and has previously published studies by distinguished scientists such as Patty Jo Watson, Melvin Fowler, Jane Buikstra, and George Milner. In addition, we have a specially edited, thematic issue of articles on New Philadelphia under review with Historical Archaeology, the peer-reviewed journal of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

In June, 2007, Chris Fennell, Tommy Hailey (Northwestern State University in Louisiana), and Bryan Haley (University of Mississippi), received approval of a grant from the National Center for Preservation Technology and Training to conduct a low-altitude aerial survey of the New Philadelphia town site using a high resolution thermal camera to look for subsurface anomalies that may correlate with archaeological features. We plan to conduct the aerial survey in May, 2008. Depending on weather conditions, the survey will most likely be undertaken in the week of May 12. The timing for conducting the aerial survey depends upon a variety of logistical concerns and contingencies that include ground cover conditions and periodic rainfall conditions.

Our 2006 summer field school in archaeology at New Philadelphia was sponsored by the University of Maryland, University of Illinois, Illinois State Museum, University of Central Florida, and the New Philadelphia Association, with support from the National Science Foundation's program of Research Experiences for Undergraduates. Ten undergraduate students and three graduate students from around the country participated in the summer fieldschool. Our investigations focused on residential and merchants sites in three blocks of the town site, including Blocks 3, 4, and 8, and the area of an early blacksmith shop. A special speaker series held during the field school included talks by James Davis, Floyd Mansberger, Timothy Baumann, and Kamau Kemayo. Abdul Alkalimat also participated in discussions with the field school students concerning issues of racism in American history and society.

On June 17, 2006, a "Day of Discovery" was convened at the town site, organized by the McWorter family, the New Philadelphia Association, and the Illinois State Museum. Many descendants of the families who once resided at New Philadelphia and the surrounding region attended this event, shared genealogical and historical research, and toured the archaeological excavations. In our continuing efforts focusing on archival research, we have also now published an expanded set of Hadley Township census data on the University of Maryland's internet site for the New Philadelphia project.

We enjoyed terrific seasons of excavations during 2004-2006 at the New Philadelphia site in western Illinois. The image below shows an outline of the 1836 town plat of New Philadelphia overlain on a 1998 aerial photograph of the landscape on which the town was located. Under the direction of Michael Hargrave, field school students conducted geophysical surveys using electric resistivity and electromagnetic sensors, which indicated likely locations for foundation remains or other artifact concentrations below the surface. The areas of town lots in which we conducted geophysical surveys during 2004-2006 are marked with blue in the image below. We also conducted excavations, completing numerous five-foot-square units, the general locations of which are marked in red below. Our excavations uncovered several intact archaeological features, including the remains of foundations and storage spaces.

Map of excavation and geophyscial survey locations.

Michelle Huttes, working in collaboration with others on this project, prepared and submitted an application in the autumn of 2004 to have the entire town site nominated to the National Register of Historic Places. That application was greatly strengthened by the archaeological data we obtained up through the end of excavations in 2004. This nomination received official support from Governor Rod Blagojevich, U.S. Senator Richard Durbin, and U.S. Senator Barak Obama, among others. On June 2, 2005, the Illinois Historic Sites Advisory Council approved and forwarded to the National Park Service the nomination of the New Philadelphia site to the National Register. The National Park Service's review panel later approved the nomination, and the town site of New Philadelphia was added to the National Register of Historic Places as a nationally significant archaeological resource on August 11, 2005.

Excavations in the summer of 2005 concentrated on areas in Blocks 3, 4, 8, 9, and 13, uncovering foundations of additional buildings and high quantities of artifacts. Our excavators during 2005 included 10 undergraduates participating in the NSF-REU field school, 14 undergraduates participating in a field school hosted by the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 5 graduate students, and 3 archaeology instructors. Additional geophysical surveys were conducted by Mike Hargrave, and a low-altitude aerial survey was conducted by Tommy Hailey of Northwestern State University in Louisiana.

The 2005 summer field season concluded with a very exciting event. A reunion of more than 50 members of the McWorter Family was held at New Philadelphia during the last weekend in June, 2005. The New Philadelphia Association hosted a barbeque in honor of the event. The family members toured the excavation sites, examined many of the types of artifacts uncovered to date, and asked many questions of the archaeologists and field school students who were onsite to describe the excavation units open for viewing. The family members also visited the nearby cemetery that includes the grave of Free Frank McWorter. A special speaker series held during the field school included talks by Art Wilson, Anna Agbe-Davies, Vibert White, and Abdul Alkalimat.

McWorter family members at New Philadelphia, 2005 (Photo by C. Valvano).

One of graduate students, Christopher Valvano, is skilled as a photographer, as well as an archaeologist, and has provided some great photos of our 2005 field school students and three generations of McWorter family members at their reunion. You can also view some of Paul Shackel's photos of our 2006 field school events.

In documentary research, we have begun expanding a database of the census records to provide records of residents both within the town area and in the surrounding township region to explore potential, broader social patterns. We also uncovered additional documentary sources. To our knowledge, 19th-century tax records for Hadley Township, Illinois (which include households in New Philadelphia) have not been examined previously, and we have now compiled and published the text of these on our website. In addition, we are investigating the original corporate records of the Hannibal & Naples Railroad to explore possible reasons for the railroad having bypassed the town in the late 1860s. We are also conducting a review of newspapers from the relevant region and time period to find articles, notices or advertisements concerning various topics related to the town's history.

We have also undertaken to record oral history interviews. Our oral history project provides evidence about what people today see as important community stories. We want to examine how the history and stories of New Philadelphia have been created over time. In addition, our recording of oral history interviews provides important stories about racialization and how the town existed as a multiracial community into the 1920s.

We are designing this collaborative archaeology, history, and oral history project to be as democratic as possible. We are endeavoring to be transparent in the way we are collecting and displaying our data to the various individuals and communities interested in this subject by placing everything we find online. For example, information and transcriptions concerning the town's land ownership records, census data, and tax records are now available and fully searchable on our web sites. Our goal is to make sure we post information as soon as it becomes available for others to see, use, interpret and critique.

The New Philadelphia site was featured in the Illinois Archaeology Awareness Program in 2005, with artifacts from New Philadelphia a focus of that program's promotional poster, entitled "Archaeology and African-American Heritage: Places on the Pathways of Freedom." As part of this Awareness program, copies of this poster were distributed to educational and heritage organizations throughout the State (click on the poster image below to learn more.)

Set out below is a sampling of recent news articles concerning New Philadelphia.

In 1836, "Free" Frank McWorter became the first black person to incorporate a town in America. Though New Philadelphia no longer exists, Gov. Rod Blagojevich announced Thursday that a section of Interstate 72 in Pike County henceforth will be known as "Frank McWorter Highway."

The site of New Philadelphia is about six miles east of Barry and a short distance north of I-72. Frank McWorter Highway will stretch for about 35 miles between Griggsville and the Mississippi River.

Blagojevich made the announcement at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library before a group of government officials, community members and 25 second-, third- and fourth-graders from St. Patrick's Catholic School.

According to information published by New Philadelphia scholar Christopher Fennell, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, McWorter was born into slavery in South Carolina in 1777. When he was 18, hi! s owners moved him to Kentucky. They thought enough of McWorter that, when the family moved again, this time to Tennessee, they left him behind to run the farm.

In his free time, McWorter started a saltpeter mining operation and saved enough money to buy the freedom of his wife in 1817 and himself in 1819, at a cost of $800 each. Over time, he would buy 14 more members of his family into freedom, spending about $14,000. McWorter also is thought to have been part of the Underground Railroad, a secret network of safe havens that helped countless slaves to freedom in the northern United States and Canada.

McWorter settled in Pike County in 1830 and registered the town of New Philadelphia in 1836. State census records show the town reached its peak population in 1865, with 30 households and 170 people, Fennell said. But when railroads were built in 1869, people left New Philadelphia in droves. Over time, the town no longer existed as such, and county officials rev! oked its municipal status in 1885.

On hand for Thursday's dedic ation ceremony was Sandra McWorter, Frank's great-great-granddaughter. She said the youngest members of the family are eighth-generation McWorters, some of whom still live in Illinois.

Sandra McWorter, with Gov. Rod Blagojevich at her side, unveils a sign Thursday at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library naming a portion of Interstate 72 in Pike County after her great-great-grandfather, Frank McWorter.

Sandra McWorter went to some lengths to get to the event. On Wednesday, she drove from Toledo, Ohio, to Chicago, where she boarded a Greyhound bus to Springfield at 6 a.m. Thursday. Once in town, her cabdriver dropped her off at the municipal public library - the wrong library - also named for Abraham Lincoln.

Her trip home got off to a better start. The governor, who had flown to Springfield from his home in Chicago on Wednesday, gave her a lift back to that city on his state-owned aircraft.

For more information about Free Frank McWorter and a link to Fennell's New Philadelphia Web site, visit www.mcworter.net.

(Copyright 2005, The State Journal-Register, a division of Copley Press, Inc. All rights reserved.)

BARRY, Ill. -- Gerald McWorter and Allen Kirkpatrick know looking into their family's past will inspire more interest in that history in the future.

Their family's history -- the legacy of Frank McWorter, a former slave who incorporated the racially integrated community of New Philadelphia near Barry in 1836 -- carries a broad appeal, not just to the cousins and their relatives scattered across the country but to the public.

"We are the children of the last generation that was born and grew up here in Pike County," said McWorter, who grew up in Chicago and now teaches at the University of Toledo in Ohio. "We grew up hearing the stories about Pike County. Many of us have been to Pike County before, some when we were very small."

Eight family members from four states returned to those roots Saturday, turning out for the Barry Apple Festival. It was a chance to visit the New Philadelphia site and to meet with members of the association committed to researching, preserving and interpreting the historic site.

The visit should open the door to more involvement in the project by descendants of the man known as Free Frank.

"This is a landmark thing," New Philadelphia Association President Phil Bradshaw said. "Gerald McWorter said it's important to look at the history to make the future better."

The McWorter descendants and NPA members shared a meal and met for over an hour to discuss activities taking place at the site and the future of the cemetery on the site.

"We have covered a tremendous amount of ground," one family member said.

"I can be a conduit between the family and the New Philadelphia Association," said Kirkpatrick, who lives in South Holland. "I can come down periodically."

The group also discussed preliminary plans to gather again during the second phase of archaeological work slated to begin in May and at next year's apple festival.

A $226,500 National Science Foundation grant funds bringing nine students to the New Philadelphia sites for three summers to excavate property sites. The summer field schools give students five weeks at the site northeast of Barry along the Baylis blacktop doing supervised excavation work, then working at the Illinois State Museum in Springfield to catalogue their finds from the first community incorporated by an African-American in the United States.

Work done this summer shed light on what the people of New Philadelphia ate, possessions in their homes and where they hailed from based on regional preferences.

Paul Shackel, head of the Center for Heritage Resources at the University of Maryland, oversaw the field school and met with the association and family members.

"This is a very good day. I'm glad to be part of it," he said.

"This adds a tremendous amount of insight to the New Philadelphia Association," board member Pat Likes said. "It will enhance the project."

The archaeological and oral history work ties into the vision of Kirpatrick's late mother Thelma, who worked to preserve her family's history. She shared stories about her father Arthur, the grandfather of the cousins and the grandson of Free Frank.

"New Philadelphia is an important part of that," McWorter said.

For the cousins, just visiting the New Philadelphia site provided a highlight.

"I'm from the city. It's a comforting thing to be in a rural environment," McWorter said.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Independence Day has taken on new layers of meaning for a team of archaeologists who've been digging in western Illinois this summer.

In fact, nearly everything about the excavation in the rolling farmland near Barry speaks volumes about freedom and liberty, nearly everything adds a chapter to the American Dream.

Sponsored by a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation's Research Experiences for Undergraduates Program and led by staff from one museum and two universities, including the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the dig in the pastureland formerly known as New Philadelphia is uncovering "the contours of the daily life of the first town incorporated by an African American before the Civil War."

So says project co-director Christopher Fennell, an archaeologist who specializes in 18th and 19th century archaeology and African- American history. His co-directors are Paul Shackel, an anthropologist at the University of Maryland, and Terrance Martin, an archaeologist and associate curator at the Illinois State Museum. Members of a local non-profit association and other scholars with whom those community members had first begun working recruited the leaders for their research expertise.

"As archaeologists, we're interested in the lifeways and social history of the dozens of families who lived in the town, but about whom very little is known," said Fennell, a U. of I. research associate who next month will join Illinois' anthropology department as a professor of archaeology.

New Philadelphia's story is not entirely unknown. Lying in fertile fields between the Mississippi and the Illinois rivers, the town was founded in 1836 by Frank McWorter (1777-1854), a former slave from Kentucky who came to be known as "Free Frank."

Through remarkable entrepreneurial skills, McWorter not only raised the funds to buy his wife, himself and 16 members of his family out of slavery, but also trekked from Kentucky to Illinois, bought 42 acres of land, established New Philadelphia, and then turned it into a thriving prairie community by selling parcels of his land to other enterprising individuals.

It was no small feat that the integrated community succeeded. It was, after all, "one of the toughest time periods in American history and in a landscape that was shaped by racial strife," Fennell said.

"People will say Illinois was a free state, but there were all sorts of ways that folks practiced slavery in Illinois, and there was a tremendous amount of social tension over being caught between the winds of Missouri and the neighboring slave states," he said.

Still, New Philadelphia was "a fascinating and unique circumstance," Fennell said, "so we want to discover how it unfolded over time. We will spend years doing research, trying to unpack how this little integrated agricultural community worked, how those families got along and interacted with each other."

Fennell said it is very likely that the townsfolk, including the McWorters, were involved in the Underground Railroad. Hannibal, Mo., was just 20 miles to the east "and there were a number of major abolitionists and grassroots escape routes flowing though that area at the time."

New Philadelphia thrived as an agricultural market center for 50 years, but its life-blood began draining out after the Hannibal & Naples Railroad bypassed it in the 1870s. By 1920, only a few families remained, the others having moved to prosperous towns on the railroad lines. Eventually the town turned, like much of the state, into agricultural land.

But during its good times, the town hummed harmoniously along with families of all kinds: African Americans, "who had their own poignant history," recent immigrants from Ireland, England and Canada, European-Americans, and possibly Native Americans.

Much of Free Frank's fascinating personal story was uncovered by former U. of I. history professor Juliet Walker, herself the great great granddaughter of the man.

According to Fennell, the team has used "a remarkable array of research techniques" to uncover the extinct town and its people. "Juliet Walker's fabulous study gave us leads on how to approach the town history," Fennell said.

In the first phase of the project, dozens of volunteers walked a line over 26 acres of the town site, flagging every artifact on the ground, culling some 7,000 items for their effort.

In the second survey phase, geophysicist Michael Hargrave from the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers in Champaign conducted a geophysics survey, using electric current and electromagnetic monitors to determine features below the surface of the ground, including potential stonewalls and other foundation remains.

Fennell attributes much of the field school's early success to the "cutting-edge approach to layering survey methods before we even chose where to do the in-ground excavation."

The actual digging began May 25. The research team of professionals, graduate and undergraduate students spent the first five weeks of the program in the field, excavating for artifacts and the foundations of houses and other buildings. Now they are working at the Illinois State Museum's Research and Collection Center in Springfield cataloging and analyzing their finds, including artifacts, soil and archaeobiological materials.

Findings "consistent with the time period of New Philadelphia," Fennell said, include broken dinnerware, iron nails and hardware, miniature toys, clay marbles, and all sorts of "personal wares," including buttons, fragments of bone combs and toothbrushes, comprising thousands of additional items for analysis.

For Fennell, the most exciting finds to date have been the "intact foundation remains," exciting in view of one of the team's priorities: to have the entire town placed on the National Register of Historic Places. For that to happen, certain things, for example, intact archaeological and architectural features, should be present.

"So rather than just digging a site and collecting all the artifacts that may have been part of a trash dump, for example, we're specifically interested in finding the remains of the foundations, the footprints of the homes and buildings that were used there.

"We've had tremendous success already this summer in that we have five or six such features already uncovered, and so we'll be applying this coming fall to get the entire town on the National Register of Historic Places."

It is rare for an entire town to be placed on this register, Fennell noted.

However, there are hundreds of people pulling for that to happen.

"Both the local community and the descendant community – folks who are descended from the original families but who now live elsewhere – have been fairly vocal thus far in saying they would like to see an interpretive visitors center built at or near the site, where this incredible story of New Philadelphia will be told, and where you can see some of the archaeological remains and the landscape of the town."

The surrounding communities of Pike County have, in fact, been "just incredibly supportive," Fennell said.

"This was the most well-appointed archaeological dig I've ever been on. Through their own fundraising and logistical support, they helped provide us with a large tent and with a trailer that was air- conditioned and had running water. … In addition, a local hunting lodge provided room and board for the students at significantly discounted rates.

"We kept trying to tell the students that this wasn't the way the average archaeological project worked," Fennell said.

The students are a story in themselves, Fennell said: "a remarkably integrated group in terms of their own ethnic and cultural heritage who are studying the history of a remarkably integrated town."

"A primary consideration was to try to attract students who are of an ethnic or cultural heritage that is underrepresented in these kinds of research projects," Fennell said. "Another consideration was to provide such hands-on research experience to students enrolled at smaller liberal arts colleges who would not normally have access to these kinds of scientific research-methods programs during the summer."

In a remote pasture in western Illinois, researchers have been digging up buttons, porcelain and other artifacts from a former frontier village launched by a freed slave.

It's the earliest known town incorporated by a black man in the country, and researchers want it named a national historic site. Crews will wrap up their first archaeological dig this weekend in the field, located about 30 miles southeast of Quincy.

Historians say Frank McWorter launched the integrated town of New Philadelphia in 1836, a quarter century before the Civil War.

"'Free Frank' is every bit as much an American hero as Frederick Douglass or Martin Luther King," said Vibert White, a history professor and project consultant.

Researchers have been combing the plowed field for nearly two years. They uncovered thousands of artifacts, including nails, buttons and pieces of broken glass, ceramics and brick, said Paul Shackel, the project's lead archaeologist.

They started digging deeper last month, using a $200,000 National Science Foundation grant. The grant also will pay for digs the next two summers and a laboratory analysis of the artifacts, said Shackel, director of the University of Maryland's Center for Heritage Resource Studies.

So far, the excavation has turned up traces of about a third of New Philadelphia's 30 or so residences, as well as trash pits, which could provide clues to dietary habits and lifestyles, Shackel said.

He said buttons and thimbles could offer a glimpse of household activities, while fragments of porcelain dolls and dishes could show whether the village traded with other cities or was shut off because of its roots.

"All of this will eventually tell the story of New Philadelphia how people lived their everyday life. Our goal is to show how an integrated community survived. By the third summer, we should have a real nice view of what this town looked like and how people interacted," Shackel said.

McWorter, whose grave is near the lost town, was a slave for a Kentucky man who allowed him to earn wages in his spare time. He saved, bought a small farm and earned enough money to buy his freedom, as well as his wife's.

He later traded his Kentucky farm for another farm in western Illinois that prospered. That enabled him to buy the freedom of his slave-born children and other relatives. He then bought more land and established New Philadelphia, giving the newly freed slaves a place to buy homes and become independent.

New Philadelphia grew to about 170 people 35 percent black and began to slowly fade away when it was bypassed by the railroad in 1869, Shackel said.

Supporters of the town want it to be placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Ultimately, they want to make it part of the National Park Service, which would require an act of Congress.

Rep. Ray LaHood, a Republican who represents the area, has followed the project and would consider sponsoring the town's addition to the park system, said spokesman Tim Butler.

White, who headed the project until he moved to the University of Central Florida last year, thinks New Philadelphia's legacy could attract 25,000 to 100,000 visitors a year.

"When you think of black people in that era, you think of slavery and hostility. This town was focused on Americanism, trying to create a society free of ill feelings toward any race," White said.

(Copyright 2004 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

Archeologists Friday are to finish digging up a plowed field in Illinois that has evidence of New Philadelphia, Ill., apparently the first planned black town in America.

"Frank McWorter purchased 42 acres," Terrance Martin, curator of anthropology at the Illinois State Museum in Springfield, told BlackAmericaWeb.com. "He drew 60- by 120-foot lots. It's the earliest planned community, planned by an African-American in North America."

That would be 1836.

Martin added: "There are other black towns in Illinois, but they are crossroads settlements, not planned communities."

Paul Shackel, director of the Center for Heritage Resource Studies at the University of Maryland, said, "McWorter's a legend out here [in Illinois]. He's in the atlases and county history."

McWorter, said Martin, was born a slave in South Carolina. His master moved to Kentucky. There, the master allowed McWhorter to save money he earned at a salt peeter operation. As a result, McWorter purchased his freedom and his wife's freedom for $800 each, and also freed at least 16 descendants.

McWorter came to Illinois in 1831, purchased land and established a farming operation, believed to be corn and wheat, said Shackel. New Philadelphia was incorporated in 1836.

While known in rural Illinois, the former slave turned town builder is virtually unknown to the rest of us. Pike County is in west central Illinois, 70 miles west of state capital Springfield, and 25 miles east of Hannibal, Mo., birthplace of Mark Twain.

Shackel, who is directing the dig, said he became aware of New Philadelphia two years ago when he was invited by an Afro-American studies professor at the University of Illinois at Springfield to learn more about the early 19th century town.

"I suggested we do an archeological survey," said Shackel. "We partnered with the Illinois State Museum, got volunteers, and we walked the plowed field where we thought the town was located.

"We found people's garbage. That's how we determined where the people lived."

Shackel said New Philadelphia lasted nearly 100 years: After incorporation in 1836, the first houses were built in 1840. By 1855, there were 58 people. By 1870, there were 170 people in 31 households.

Then the railroad came to Pike County in the 1870s. The train avoided the town.

Martin said local lore is the rail line was routed north of New Philadelphia to avoid the black town, but the curator said it was probable that terrain issues, not race, affected where the tracks were laid.

Nevertheless, because the railroad missed the farm community, "We believe most people left," said Shackel. The town was unincorporated in 1885.

By 1900, seven to eight families remained. Gradually, by the 1950s, all signs of the town disappeared. It was plowed over as if it never existed, said a release from the University of Maryland.

In two years, Shackel and his team have recovered over 10,000 artifacts, including items unexpected in a frontier location, such as porcelain dolls and fine china. This summer the team has unearthed foundations, storage cellars and pits related to the town's early settlement, providing further clues to the settlers' lifestyles, said the University of Maryland.

"What is important about what we've discovered is the artifacts are intact," said Shackel. "We thought the artifacts might be destroyed because of plowing. Our goal is to get the town on the National Register of Historic Places."

"I'm very convinced it can have status like Nicodemus, Kan., which is run by the National Park Service and is one of 380 National Park Service sites."

With summer excavations ending Friday, in July students will process the artifacts at the Illinois State Museum.

Martin said, "Over the years we will work to have temporary exhibits of the artifacts. We might set up in Pike County. We also want to get the artifacts in a climate controlled setting and accessible to other researchers."

Researchers, said Martin, should find this detail interesting: New Philadelphia was integrated. "We're checking genealogies and we are finding links to Cuba, Ireland and New England," he said.

"The more we learn, the more interesting and significant New Philadelphia becomes."