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Archaeologists find location of Ramptown
June 17, 2002
KALAMAZOO--When a team of archaeologists from Western Michigan
University was asked to help locate the site of Ramptown, the
final stop on the Underground Railroad for many African Americans
who fled slavery from the 1830s to 1860s, they didn't expect
to find it in more than one place.
Any signs of Ramptown, a rural enclave located near Vandalia,
Mich., believed to have housed hundreds of escaped African Americans,
disappeared more than a century ago. Last fall, the Michigan
Historical Center and the Vandalia Underground Railroad Foundation
asked Dr. Michael Nassaney, WMU associate professor of anthropology,
to locate Ramptown's site as part of a state and local effort
to highlight the Underground Railroad's role in Michigan's history.
This spring, after eight months of preliminary research, Nassaney
and students in WMU's 2002 Archaeological Field School dug up
evidence, which not only verified Ramptown's existence, but also
indicated that, contrary to popular belief, Ramptown wasn't located
at a single site. Instead, Ramptown consisted of a number of
cabins and residences spread out over a wide area.
"The name 'Ramptown' gave the connotation that it was
a very confined place, but in doing our survey we've found evidence
that 'Ramptown' was probably used more as a description for the
community of escaped African Americans in this area as a whole,"
Nassaney explains. "Our evidence indicates that there was
a pattern of distribution of the cabins of these individuals
that was like the patterns you find for sharecroppers in the
American South. They weren't all located in one place."
After arriving in Michigan's Cass County via the Underground
Railroad, many escaped African Americans were given five- or
10-acre plots to farm by local Quakers in exchange for their
labor clearing land or harvesting crops. The African Americans
and their families established cabins on those plots, where most
stayed for five to 10 years. Hostile environments created by
raiders who came to Cass County to kidnap and take African Americans
back to slavery in the South led many of them to move onto other
locations such as Battle Creek, Mich., or Canada. It was only
a few decades after the abolition of slavery before standing
structural remains of Ramptown could no longer be found. Ramptown's
location also never appeared on any historical maps.
Finding Ramptown became a cause after it came to the attention
of the Freedom Trail Project of the Michigan Historical Center
at the Michigan Department of History, Arts and Libraries. Dr.
Michelle S. Johnson, the project's coordinator and a visiting
professor at Michigan State University, was investigating Cass
County's ties to the Underground Railroad when Sondra Mose-Ursery,
executive director of the Vandalia Underground Railroad Foundation,
told her about Ramptown. The Michigan Historical Center soon
contacted Nassaney about searching for the site and awarded a
$21,000 grant for WMU archaeologists to do just that.
"This was truly a collaborative effort," Johnson
says. "It illustrates the strength that emerges when state
agencies, local historians, community organizations and university
scholars come together to document local, state, national and
international aspects of the Underground Railroad."
The WMU team began last October narrowing a list of possible
sites for Ramptown. Amanda Campbell, WMU graduate student and
the manager for the project, pored through piles of maps and
other historical documents and conducted interviews with Ramptown
descendants. Prior research conducted by Virginia Springsteen,
an 82-year-old Vandalia resident and local historian, her brother
Warren Wooden, and Dr. Veta Tucker, associate professor of English
at Grand Valley State University, was instrumental in helping
Campbell whittle down Ramptown's potential locations. In 1995,
Springsteen and Wooden found the first archaeological artifacts
believed to have come from Ramptown.
This spring, the WMU team surveyed a number of those possible
sites, looking for and finding traces of domestic households.
Most of those sites were located in agricultural fields being
plowed in preparation for planting, which made the search for
artifacts a little easier.
"We found pottery shards and ceramics that are contemporaneous
with Ramptown's time period, nails, and bricks that could be
from the construction of the cabins, potentially from chimneys
or hearths," says Campbell, who hails from Harrisville,
Mich.
The artifacts were found in what Nassaney describes as a "scattered
distribution pattern" rather than in one large cluster,
which would have indicated a single, established residential
area. The locations of the artifacts showed a pattern consistent
with cabins that would have been located on five or 10-acre plots
at the corners of roads.
"We found eight clusters of artifacts that we could identify
as possibly belonging to Ramptown residents. Looking at old maps,
we were able to find the land that Quakers owned and ascertain
that the sites where we were found artifacts would have been
on those properties," says Nassaney.
WMU archaeologists will spend the next year analyzing the
Ramptown artifacts and Johnson says the information from the
analysis will be integrated into Michigan Historical Center publications,
museum exhibits and educational programs. The search for Ramptown
is part of a larger effort by the state to promote and preserve
the history of the Underground Railroad in Michigan. These efforts
also are in concert with work being conducted by the National
Park Service's National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom
Program.
"The Underground Railroad serves as a reminder of the
courageous actions of African Americans who escaped slavery and
those who came to their aid. This Michigan Freedom Trail collaborative
project with Western Michigan University and the Vandalia Underground
Railroad Foundation seeks to minimize the mystery and myth of
the Underground Railroad," says William Anderson, director
of the Department of History, Arts and Libraries. "Projects
such as this attain the Underground Railroad as a significant
part of Michigan's history and increase the cultural currency
that contributes to sound educational historical tourism in Michigan."
For the Underground Railroad Foundation in Vandalia, the findings
by WMU archaeologists are a solid confirmation of the existence
of Ramptown, which until now had lived on only in stories passed
down through generations.
"It's a story that has been told and told and told, but
we needed artifacts to confirm it," says Mose-Ursery. "Deep
in my heart, I knew it was there."
Media contact: Marie Lee, 269 387-8400, marie.lee@wmich.edu
WMU News
Office of University Relations
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Kalamazoo MI 49008-5433 USA
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