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Michael Nassaney, a professor at Western Michigan University, holds a piece of pottery found at a fugitive slave site in Vandalia.WMU team verifies fugitive slave site
Researchers submit final report offering evidence unearthed of legendary community near Vandalia.
A historical marker for the underground railroad sits in Vadalia. It's estimated 1,500 slaves arrived in Cass County.
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VANDALIA -- Sondra Mose-Ursery received a lot of blank looks from her neighbors over the years in response to her questions about a nearly forgotten 19th-century community of fugitive slaves.
"You'd ask people about Ramptown, and no one had heard about it," said Mose-Ursery, a local historian.
That was before a team from Western Michigan University's anthropology department verified Ramptown's existence with the discovery of the first archaeological evidence of fugitive slaves ever found in Michigan, according to Michael Nassaney, the team's principal investigator.
"Sites like this one are tremendously important, said Fergus M. Bordewich, a New York-based author whose history book, "Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America," was published in April.
"Archaeological evidence of the Underground Railroad is rare, and even very local sites like this one have national importance. They're as important to us here on the East Coast as to people living right there."
The archaeology team uncovered 1,143 artifacts at 12 sites during spring 2002 in Penn and Calvin townships near Vandalia, a village in southwestern Michigan's Cass County. Late last month, the team submitted its final report on its findings to the Michigan Historical Center, an agency of the state Department of History, Arts and Libraries.
The center had commissioned the research in an effort to identify key locations of the Underground Railroad.
"It really validates what people have been saying and passing on (to their descendants) for so long," said Michelle Johnson, an administrator at the center.
Historians estimate that more than 100,000 fugitive slaves used the Underground Railroad, a covert, ever-changing system of homes, hideouts and escape routes. Blacks used it to flee from the South to the free North during the 1800s before the Civil War, which ended in 1865.
Hundreds of homes and barns in southern Michigan served as safe houses for escaped slaves. For years, street banners and a state historical marker have touted Vandalia's history as a stop along the Underground Railroad.
It's estimated that 1,500 fugitive slaves arrived in Cass County seeking freedom. They were aided mostly by sympathetic Quakers and free blacks who risked imprisonment. It was illegal, even in free states, to help fugitive slaves.
Some left the county for Detroit or Canada. For the approximately 200 who stayed, the Quakers provided small plots of land in exchange for harvesting crops or clearing trees for farmland. Blacks lived in sharecropper-style cabins on the land, sometimes for years.
Within a few decades of the abolition of slavery, the structural remains of Ramptown no longer could be found. The location of the community, originally known as Young's Prairie, never appeared on any historical maps, and people with firsthand knowledge started dying out.
"Because this was a clandestine activity, it's been difficult to try to identify evidence of this," said Nassaney, an anthropology professor at Western Michigan.
His team started its work in October 2001 by narrowing down a list of possible sites for Ramptown. Others went over maps and historical documents and tracked down descendants of Ramptown residents.
The following spring, the Western Michigan team surveyed several of the possible sites to look for signs of domestic households. Most were in agricultural fields being plowed in preparation for planting.
Without doing any digging, the archaeologists found skeletons of farm animals, nails, horseshoes, and pieces of pottery, glass and brick. Because the sites didn't coincide with the locations of residences on maps from the mid-1800s, and using written and oral accounts of the area's history, the team concluded that Ramptown residents had occupied the sites.
Nassaney said he's glad the artifacts were found when they were because it's hard to say how much longer they might have survived above ground, exposed to the elements.
"The evidence is actually on the surface of the ground, and that's what makes it all the more fragile, in a sense, or potentially threatened," he said.
All but a handful of pieces are stored at the university for further study. Some pottery shards and other small items were loaned to The Museum at Southwestern Michigan College and went on display in August as part of the museum's Underground Railroad exhibit.
Eventually, all the artifacts may end up at the museum.
"Our exhibit (of the Ramptown artifacts) is a small case within our permanent history gallery but it is a very important part of the history of our area," said Ann Thompson, the museum's director.
Mose-Ursery served for 10 years as Vandalia's mayor during the 1990s but for the past three years has lived in Penn Township in a Quaker home built in 1838. One of the Ramptown archaeological sites is adjacent to her property.
She started researching Ramptown in 1980 and helped Western Michigan obtain a $21,000 grant from the Michigan Historical Center that funded the archaeology work.
Mose-Ursery heads up a group that is working to preserve the local history of the Underground Railroad. The organization occasionally organizes tours that showcase the Ramptown sites.
"African-American history here in the United States is not as well known as it should be," she said.
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