Political Quotes

“Mr. President, in 1777, when our Republic was just a year old and the Revolutionary War was raging, a man named Frank McWorter was born in South Carolina. In 1795, when the war was over and George Washington was President, he moved to Kentucky. He married a woman named Lucy. And in 1830, he and his family moved to Illinois--the very same year that a man named Thomas Lincoln, along with his son Abraham, moved to there from Indiana. Frank McWorter decided he would settle down, and so he bought a farm in Pike County's Hadley Township, and he began to plan out the town of New Philadelphia. Other settlers moved in. Soon, there were family homes, businesses, and even a school. And when Frank McWorter died of natural causes in 1854, having lived more than three-quarters of a century, he died in the town he founded and guided to prosperity. The community of New Philadelphia continued to thrive until it was bypassed by the expanding railroad in 1869. Left behind by the steam engine, and the wave of expansion it pushed across the western frontier, the residents of New Philadelphia began to disperse by the late 1880's, and the town gradually disappeared again into the Illinois prairie. The story of Frank McWorter and New Philadelphia is an extraordinary one. But as I told this story a moment ago, here on the Senate floor, I left out one defining detail.…”