On a quest both personal and professional, history professor Juliet E.K. Walker bounced through a rutted hog run atop a bale of hay in the back of a badly dented pickup.
The professor`s driver, farmer Roger Woods, stopped the truck at a barbed wire fence protecting a cornfield from the hogs on his farm midway between the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers on the state`s southwestern edge.
In climbing over the fence, the University of Illinois professor-a University of Chicago Ph.D. in American history who did post-doctoral work at Harvard-snagged her pants. Undaunted, she plunged into the tight rows and trudged through their clawing, sandpaper leaves for 50 yards or so until she reached a patch-clearing shaded by ancient evergreens and overgrown with Queen Anne`s lace.
Nearly 20 weatherworn headstones and grave obelisks caught the filtered late-morning sunlight through the trees.
One of the stones, a simple tablet cracked and knocked flat to the ground, marked the final resting place of Walker`s great-great-grandfathe r, Free Frank McWorter, truly at rest and truly free at last.
Born into servitude in 1777 in South Carolina, he was the offspring of a West African slave and her Scottish-Irish slavemaster.
But the child born into slavery became known in adulthood as ”Free Frank,” a pioneer and entrepreneur who founded the town of New Philadelphia in Illinois and traded the profits from his enterprises in farming, mining and land speculation not for earthly possessions but for freedom.
Walker`s quest is to make sure that he, and his gravesite, are freed from historical obscurity.
”Many people think that before the Civil War blacks lived only as plantation slaves,” Walker said. ”But even slaves became involved in businesses, and, like Free Frank, they saved their profits and purchased freedom. His life represents an aspect of African-American history and American business history that few people acknowledge.”
Before the Civil War ostensibly set all enslaved men free, Walker`s ancestor bought his own freedom and that of 15 family members, four generations of his people.
Countless others were freed by his efforts in Illinois, where Free Frank used New Philadelphia as a way-station in the Underground Railroad, according to his great-great-granddaughter.
No photographs or drawings of Free Frank exist. But in Pike County history books, Walker came upon a description of the black settler.
Free Frank, the authors wrote, was an ”enterprising man, a reputable, worthy citizen, kind, benevolent, and honest. . . . He labored hard to free his family from the galling yoke of southern slavery.”
An exit into prominence?
Walker, a Chicago native who teaches at the U. of I. at Urbana-Champaign, has spent much of her academic career trying to secure Free Frank`s proper place in history. Her current mission is to put his remote gravesite on the state`s map and into public consciousness.
To that end, she entered the tip of southern Illinois earlier this week and proceeded on foot to Pike County on the final leg of her 17-day, 400-mile Free Frank Pioneer Freedom Walk, which retraces her great-great-grandfather`s migration in a covered wagon drawn by oxen.
Walker set out Sept. 20 at Somerset, Ky., which her ancestor left in 1831 for better opportunities in Illinois. She is to end her journey Oct. 6 in the small town of Barry, a few miles from Free Frank`s gravesite, where a ceremony will be held in his honor.
She campaigned successfully two years ago to have the humble gravesite listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Only two other
individuals` gravesites in the state share that distinction: those of Abraham Lincoln in Springfield and Stephen A. Douglas in Chicago.
A plaque designating Free Frank`s grave as a historic site will be displayed at the ceremony.
Walker has also campaigned, but unsuccessfully so far, for public access to the gravesite in the remote McWorter family cemetery.
Apart from trekking through the hog run and cornfields at the Woods family farm, the only way to reach the cemetery is to climb an intimidatingly steep hill that descends 25 feet from the south side of the cemetery to the roughed-out shoulder of a four-lane state highway being built through Pike County: the new Central Illinois Expressway.
Through her Free Frank Historic Preservation Foundation, Walker has lobbied for a ramp from the expressway to the cemetery that now overlooks it. Officials with the state Department of Transportation, while not unsympathetic, said it would cost ”millions and millions” to provide access to the cemetery from the $360 million expressway, which will link Springfield to Quincy when it is completed in late 1991.
Ironically, the expressway roughly follows a trail that Free Frank cleared from Pike County to Quincy to get his farm goods to the Mississippi River and on to market.
$15,000 investment
Free Frank`s role in pioneering western frontiers in Kentucky and Illinois was documented by Walker in her doctoral dissertation, which was published in 1983 by the University Press of Kentucky under the title ”Free Frank: A Black Pioneer on the Antebellum Frontier.”
The book is based on public records and a family treasure trove of emancipation papers, certificates of good character and legal documents handed down as the Free Frank Papers, Walker said.
Her ”Roots”-like paper documents Free Frank`s victories over slavery, Illinois` restrictive Black Codes (which charged black settlers a $1,000 bond to enter the state), and slave-catchers, as well as the inherent dangers of the rugged frontier, between the Revolutionary and Civil Wars.
Walker found that Free Frank`s struggle came at the price of $15,000, the total amount he spent in his lifetime-and after his death through the liquidation of his holdings-to liberate himself; his wife, Lucy; two sons; two daughters; seven grandchildren; two great-grandchildren; and a daughter-in-law.
McWorter family oral history has it that Free Frank came into the world in spite of the wishes of his father and slavemaster, who ordered his mother, Juda, to go to a cow pasture to deliver the baby, thinking it would not survive such a birth.
Free Frank lived and thrived, though he was a slave and unable to read or write. He managed the frontier farm of his father and master in South Carolina, and later, in his young adulthood in Kentucky, he earned extra wages by hiring out his labors to other masters when not serving his own. Then, while still a slave, he established his own business mining and selling saltpeter for the manufacture of gunpowder, which was in high demand because of the War of 1812.
Walker estimates that Free Frank might have earned up to $2 a day in the mining operation, at a time when saltpeter was selling for as much as 50 cents a pound wholesale.
With the slow profits from these ventures, Free Frank bought the freedom of his common-law wife, Lucy, in 1817, for $800. He bought his own freedom two years later for the same amount.
At that point, Lucy was 46, six years his senior, and had already given birth to 13 children (it is unknown how many survived into adulthood). Free Frank secured Lucy`s emancipation first to assure that all children born from that point would be free.
Before moving to Illinois, a ”free state,” Free Frank traded his saltpeter mining operation, valued at about $2,500, for the liberation of his namesake son who was born before Lucy`s emancipation.
A runaway son
The rebellious son had fled to Canada, and his owner demanded a high price. The trade of the mining works and all equipment for his 21-year-old son was recorded in the Pulaski County Real Estate Conveyances record in Kentucky. As part of the trade, the slave owner received ”24 Still Tubbs, Two Stake stands two singling and one doubling kegs.” In return, he agreed to
”sell and deliver to said Free Frank one mulatto boy named Frank who has run away from me about three years and six months.”
Free Frank and his family then set out in the ox-drawn wagon for Illinois, traveling about a mile and a half per hour. Land was cheap, and Free Frank capitalized by buying 160 acres of gently sloping terrain in modern Pike County for $100 from the federal government.
He thus became, at age 53, perhaps the first black man to legally establish a town in this country, according to Walker`s research.
Even that venture was undertaken to secure the freedom of a family member. Free Frank laid out the town in 144 lots on 80 acres, and sold the lots to settlers, blacks and whites.
He then used those profits together with income from his farming and livestock operations to buy the freedom of more children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, Walker said.
In addition, the family built a secret room in the basement of their home in New Philadelphia as a station in the Underground Railroad. The family covertly shuttled runaway slaves to freedom in Canada, out of reach from their masters and bounty hunters, according to Walker. Three shoemakers thrived in the town by making footwear that Free Frank supplied to runaways, she said.
A remarkable marriage
New Philadelphia died out in 1885 when the railroad circumvented it. Walker has a dream of rebuilding the village, which peaked at a population of about 60. She envisions it as a living history museum where young black children can see that they, too, share in the heritage of Illinois and their country, she said.
”Blacks were involved in business, but their efforts were not recorded in histories written by whites,” she said. ”I want people to consider other ways that blacks have contributed to history.”
Free Frank`s contributions did not end with his death. His will ordered that his holdings, then about 800 acres, should be sold off and the profits used to free as many family members as possible.
The relationship of Free Frank and his wife, Lucy, who died at 99 in 1870 and is buried next to her husband, is something of a historic event in itself, Walker said. Although slavery destroyed many African-American families, theirs endured.
To ensure that Lucy and Frank would always be legal partners, the common- law couple arranged a formal marriage ceremony in 1839, after they had settled in Illinois as free man and wife.
Pike County historians recorded the event and reported:
”When McWorter was asked if he would live with, cherish and support, etc., his wife, he replied, `Why God bless your soul! I`ve done that thing for the last 40 years.` ”
