Bostick Settlement and Cemetery, Murphysboro
Established in 1870, the Bostick Settlement was Murphysboro's first and most prominent black community; nearly all of Murphysboro's 120 black residents lived there. The Bostick Settlement was formed by three brothers, Stephen, Dudley and Hardin Bostick. Born slaves in Tennessee, the brothers joined the Union Navy in January 1863. After the war, they settled on farmland south of Murphysboro and were soon joined by other former slaves, mostly from their native Tennessee. The farming community was successful and soon constructed its own church, school and cemetery. By 1907, Stephen Bostick owned 170 acres of land, making him one of the most successful farmers in the county. As the twentieth century progressed, however, the settlement dwindled in numbers. Many of the original settlers are buried in Bostick Cemetery.
Visitor information
Bostick Cemetery
Orchard Hill Road
Murphysboro, IL
Equal Rights Settlement, Jo Daviess County
By 1823, between 100 and 150 slaves lived in Jo Daviess County, brought there to work the lead mines. Most slaves in the Galena region were women, reflecting the sustained political strength of pro-slavery advocates in the area, even as the mining industry declined. With the advent of steam travel, even more southerners migrated farther north into Illinois, bringing with them bonded African Americans to work as hotel staff, boatmen and domestic servants. These black residents had a profound impact on the development of northern Illinois.
The decline of the mining industry resulted in an economic downturn in the region. Many blacks left the city of Galena, and the Colored Union Baptist Church closed in the mid-1850s. Its pastor, Henry Smith, moved with his wife and children to nearby Rush Township, where they established a farmstead.
Smith was joined by another pastor, former miner Walter Baker, and together the men participated in a larger organization called the Northwestern Association of Regular Predestinarian Baptists. Through this group, the men travelled to other churches in Jo Daviess County and elsewhere in Illinois and Wisconsin.
They also established the town of Equal Rights, where they set up a school and church. By 1880, Equal Rights boasted thirty residents, most of them related to Smith, on seventy acres of farmland. The community peaked in the late 1880s, but died out in the 1890s as residents moved on to larger cities like Clinton, Iowa. The old school house still stands, though it has been converted into a private home, and so do remnants of lime kilns used by the Smith family to produce fertilizer for commercial trade.
Freedom Village/Quinn Chapel AME Church, Brooklyn
Also known as Lovejoy, after famed abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy, or "Freedom Village," Brooklyn is one mile north of East St. Louis in St. Clair County. The town was platted by white settlers in the early 1830s, but most town lots were sold to African Americans, making it an integrated settlement. One of its early residents was Priscilla Baltimore, a former slave born in Kentucky in 1801. Baltimore was an influential figure in Brooklyn's early history. She took in an itinerant preacher named William Paul Quinn between 1838 and 1840, and her home is reported to have been the first venue for African Methodist Episcopal church services in Illinois. She also helped Quinn found the first AME church west of the Mississippi, St. Paul's in St. Louis. Under Quinn's leadership, the church was a hub of abolitionist activities and a fixture on Illinois' Underground Railroad. The church is still active today.
In 1873, Brooklyn became the first town incorporated by African Americans in the United States. After the Civil War, Brooklyn began to attract blacks migrating from the south. Its proximity to the growing industrial cities of East St. Louis and St. Louis made it an ideal place for people who wanted to live in a black-majority town while finding work beyond agricultural labor. Gradually, the integrated village evolved into an all-black commuter suburb and, in the 1870s, African Americans took over the town politically.
Despite residents' efforts to bring economic development to Brooklyn, the railroads and white industrialists expanded instead to the white communities surrounding St. Louis. Gradually single males made up the majority of Brooklyn's population, changing the town's composition. In the first decades of the twentieth century, political corruption and scandal replaced the enlightened leadership of earlier years, and the town fell into decline.
Today, the town has a renewed interest in its history as an early haven for fugitive slaves and free blacks. Archaeological field studies in partnership with Illinois universities now are shedding light on the lives of Brooklyn's earliest residents, who saw their community as an experiment in self-rule and democracy and worked to set an example of how a black community could thrive amidst slavery, discrimination and racism. Recently, the Illinois State Archaeological Survey, in a joint project of the state with the University of Illinois, conducted outreach with the village of Brooklyn, volunteering to survey some of the areas associated with its early history. A team of archaeologists found evidence of African American occupation from 1830 to 1850, as well as material in other areas from 1850 to 1870. This discovery suggests that the remains of Mother Baltimore's Freedom Village survive beneath the surface in today's Upper Brooklyn. An archaeological field study began in the summer of 2009 to excavate the site.
Visitor information
Quinn Chapel AME Church
108 N 5th Street
Brooklyn, IL 62059
(618) 271-6917
Miller Grove, Shawnee National Forest
Miller Grove in far southern Illinois was settled in 1844 by former slaves from Tennessee. The Heritage Program of the Shawnee National Forest began conducting archaeological excavation in 1995 at sites related to African American residents of Miller Grove.
Visitor information
Miller Grove, Shawnee National Forest
50 Highway 145 South
Harrisburg, Illinois 62946
(618) 253-7114
http://www.fs.usda.gov/main/shawnee/home
New Philadelphia
Platted and legally registered by Free Frank McWorter, New Philadelphia was the first town in the United States established by a free African American before the Civil War. McWorter acquired land in sparsely populated, hilly region of Pike County, between the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers, in the late 1830s. Once he established the town, he subdivided the lots and sold them off using the proceeds to purchase the freedom of the rest of his family.
McWorter's choice of location for New Philadelphia was sound. The town became a crossroads in the transfer of agricultural products and goods to the Mississippi River just twenty miles to the west. Both whites and blacks bought property in New Philadelphia, and the town existed as an integrated community.
At the time the town was founded, proposed construction of an Illinois-Michigan canal encouraged growth in that region. Additionally, plans for a rail line through Pike County brought further development. When the railroad was built in 1869, however, it bypassed New Philadelphia, setting up station stops instead in the neighboring white town of Barry. New Philadelphia declined, and its town status was dissolved in 1885. Today, New Philadelphia is the site of major archaeological work to uncover the story of the free blacks who settled there and has been designated a National Historic Landmark.
Visitor information
A marker commemorating New Philadelphia is three miles east of the present site of Barry in Hadley Township.
http://newphiladelphiail.org/
