The Underground Railroad:

Uncovering Clues to Ramptown

You can no longer see the log cabins where fugitives lived on the farm that belonged to Issac A. Bonine. However, there may be other clues about Ramptown.

Eighty-three-year-old Virginia Springsteen, who lives in Cassopolis, has found artifacts that might help archaeologists locate Ramptown. As a little girl, she lived on the farm where Ramptown was. Her mother, Treva Wooden, kept a family memory book of photographs, letters and news articles.

Mrs. Springsteen now has her own memory book. For years she has spent time at the Cass History Library, the County Courthouse, and the Treasurer's office, researching census, birth, death and cemetery records, and maps to try to piece together the Ramptown story. Here is part of her story. The photograph shows Mrs. Springsteen as a little girl with her two brothers at Ramptown.

From 1920 to 1927, my parents, R. Jay and Treva Wooden, rented the Bonine farm from Mary Dugan who had inherited the farm from her father. My father grew wheat, corn, oats and hay and raised pigs, cows and sheep. He had teams of horses and a Fordson tractor. We lived on the farm where Ramptown was but didn't know much about it. I remember one night while eating dinner; my mother said she wondered why there were so many boards and so much debris coming up out of the soil as they worked the ground. John "Tobe" Harper, an African American who helped us work our farm, said, "That's where Ramptown was. My wife's mother was born there." In 1927, we moved to another farm a mile away. Twenty-seven years later we read an article in the Elkhart, Indiana, newspaper just across the Michigan border about the history of the runaways who lived in our county. Then, we put two and two together and I began to research the community's history. I learned that "ramps" are green from the onion and garlic family. The fugitives used to eat them in the spring. Recently, I learned from the obituary (1929) of John Harper's father-in-law, Andrew Jones, that he was also born in Ramptown. In 1990 and again on April 23, 1995, my brother Warren and I visited the place where Warren played while our mother worked in the fields. It's by the woods. It's hilly. It's still there and we found these pieces of glass and crockery and dishes!

Archaeologists at Western Michigan University held a field school for university archaeology students in 2002 to try to unearth more clues and physical evidence about the people who lived at Ramptown.