Smile Across America is a series about real people and communities finding practical ways to make life a little brighter. This report is based on National Park Service announcements; the accompanying images are original editorial illustrations, not documentary photographs.
In west-central Illinois, a new $25,000 grant is set to make room for a simple but powerful kind of community work: people telling their own local history.
New Philadelphia National Historic Site has received support from the Jefferson National Parks Association’s BlueSky Opportunity Fund for an 18-month initiative called Our Past, Our Voices: Building Community through Citizen Storytelling at New Philadelphia. The National Park Service says the project will create Storytelling Stations that pair first-person historical vignettes with live, on-site and digital storytelling.
A history that belongs in many voices
New Philadelphia’s story has long been carried through records, oral histories, archaeology, descendants, and neighboring communities. The town was founded in 1836 by Free Frank McWorter, a formerly enslaved man; the National Park Service describes it as the first U.S. town platted and legally registered by an African American.
That background gives the new program a particularly human scale. Rather than treating history as something visitors only read on a sign, the plan is to invite community members into monthly workshops where they can learn to present local stories for national audiences. The grant will also support paid internships in historical research and interpretive narrative development with Illinois College, the University of Illinois Springfield, and the New Philadelphia Association.
Listening is part of the plan
There is no announcement yet of workshop dates or internship openings. The park says that information will be shared as the project develops. That is worth stating plainly: these are plans now, not programs the public can already attend.
Still, the project offers a hopeful model. It connects historical research with the people who know a region, care for its memory, and want to pass it along. In a place whose legacy has been sustained by generations of people refusing to let it disappear, training new citizen storytellers is less a handoff than an invitation.
Park superintendent Chris Collins said the project will strengthen the site’s ability to share New Philadelphia’s stories and that the park looks forward to working with students and community members. For readers following along from elsewhere, the small joy is in the premise: a national historic site is making space for local voices to be heard.
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