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Graves may yield data on Underground Railroad stop

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Carole
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« on: February 29, 2008, 02:46:27 am »

Today that cemetery on the ridge south of New Straitsville is the only physical evidence of the community's existence.

In fact, the cemetery, which was used for burials between 1852 and 1927, is what first attracted Cramer's attention in the early 1990s because it includes markers for five or six Civil War veterans of the U.S. Colored Troops.

She found that surprising because few African-Americans now live in the area and there was little historical evidence of a large black community there.

 

In 1993, Cramer mentioned the cemetery in a program she gave. The Lancaster Genealogical Society heard about it and the 14 club members — all white — agreed to adopt the cemetery and research its past.

In 1999, the Wayne National Forest received a five-year research grant from the Forest Service's Civil Rights Office and partnered with Historically Black Colleges and Universities, a national coalition of predominantly black schools.


Stop documented

African-American students from Lincoln University in Missouri and Tennessee State University began spending summers in nearby Nelsonville to dig into the history of Paynes Crossing.

Cramer, who extended her research to Pokepatch in 1997, said though it's highly likely Paynes Crossing was an Underground Railroad stop, that may be difficult to conclusively prove. But that's not the case with Pokepatch.

That community was documented as an Underground Railroad stop by Ohio State University professor Wilbur Siebert who in the 1890s studied such sites.

Like Paynes Crossing, Pokepatch was settled in the 1820s by a racially diverse group of people, including whites, free blacks, mulattos and Indians.

The only signs of the community today are the Union Baptist Church and a small cemetery on private land.

Union Baptist was organized in 1819. The first two structures were log churches, built in 1819 and 1879. The present church was built in 1919 and belongs to the Providence Missionary Baptist Association, formerly called the Providence Anti-Slavery Missionary Baptist Association.

Deanda Johnson, a doctoral student, is coordinating the work being done at Ohio University, which got involved with the National Forest research in 2004.

More records are available on Pokepatch than on Paynes Crossing, she said.

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