Amanda Campbell This is Me

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1. 1. Leaderpub.com

   www.dowagiacnews.com/articles/ - [Cached]

   Published on: 4/12/2004   Last Visited: 4/12/2004

   "Ramptown: A Pre-Civil War African American Community in Cass County" will come alive for the campers through the eyes of Amanda Campbell of Western Michigan University and museum staff member Donna Odom, who has been researching the subject and Michigan's Underground Railroad history for four years.

2. 2. WMU News

   www.wmich.edu/~wmu/news/2002/0 - [Cached]

   Published on: 9/6/2001   Last Visited: 6/18/2002

   Amanda Campbell, WMU graduate student and the manager for the project, pored through piles of maps and other historical documents and conducted interviews with Ramptown descendants.
   ...
   "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.

3. 3. WNDU-TV: News Story: Underground Railroad existed in Michigan

   www.wndu.com/news/062002/news_ - [Cached]

   Published on: 6/15/2002   Last Visited: 6/15/2002

   Amanda Campbell, Project Manager of the WMU, explains, "Many people in the community said for a long time there was a settlement here of people who were fleeing slavery." But no one knew for sure if the stories were true.
   
   "There were no structural remains aboveground. All we had to go on was a couple mentions here and there in old histories and what the community said, what they remembered," Campbell says.
   
   Goal reached Now, after eight months of research and digging, there's proof that it did exist. Pieces of ceramic, parts of red bricks, nails and oddly colored glass were found in Cass County farm fields, where such things aren't normally found.
   
   Campbell suggests, "These were the things that were left behind from a life over a century ago." Oral history said the Underground Railroad stopped here.
   
   Further proof African-American families lived in a place called Ramptown. Ramptown was originally thought to be one location, but archaeologists have so far found 12 sites. And what about the name Ramptown?