COLUMBUS — After poring over cemetery, probate and property records for two years, Ann Cramer has a fairly good idea where Poke Patch used to be. But pinpointing the lost station for the Underground Railroad will take more time.

        Ms. Cramer and her colleagues want to be sure before they begin an archaeological dig in western Gallia County to continue seeking evidence of communities that aided in the railroad.

        “We need a nice, early house site,” said Ms. Cramer, a U.S. Forest Service archaeologist who studies historical sites in the 240,000-acre Wayne National Forest in southeastern Ohio.

        “We have one or two house sites (for Poke Patch), but the Underground Railroad component was disturbed because they were lived in until the 1970s and '80s.”

        Ms. Cramer is in the third year of a joint project with national forest archaeologists in Indiana and Illinois to study lost sites along the Underground Railroad, a network of safe havens for slaves fleeing to the north in the years before the Civil War.

        Documents provide clues to their whereabouts, and digs provide the evidence.

        Ms. Cramer and her colleagues received a national award for their work from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the Forest Service.

        The researchers use grant money from the department's Historically Black Colleges and Universities Program to hire minority students who spend summers researching Underground Railroad sites in national forests.

        Ms. Cramer's students in the past two years have gathered a large volume of paper evidence concerning Poke Patch, which she described as a collection of scattered homes, about 85 miles southeast of Columbus.

        The students also have researched Payne's Crossing, a Perry County community about 50 miles southeast of Columbus. Ms. Cramer has determined that at least one black Civil War veteran is buried in the cemetery there.

        Communities such as Payne's Crossing and Poke Patch were created to serve as stations along the Underground Railroad.

        “I think they were spread out so that it was easier to hide the slaves,” Ms. Cramer said.

        Freed blacks, Indians and others lived and worked in Poke Patch, she said. After the war, the community disappeared.

        “They came here and risked their lives,” she said, “and once slavery was abolished, they were done.”

        Little research has been done on northern communities such as these, Ms. Cramer said.

        She hopes to pin down a site for Poke Patch this year, and possibly invite the public to participate in a supervised dig.

        Three students are working with Ms. Cramer this year.

        Brandon Collins and Adam Carrington, computer science majors from Lincoln University in Missouri, are organizing the material amassed in the past two years into a usable database.

        Harold Garner Jr., a student at Tennessee State University, spent last year culling information about families that lived in Poke Patch.

        The 23-year-old history major, who accompanied Ms. Cramer to Illinois for a dig in the Shawnee National Forest, said he will use his summer research in his senior project.

        At Shawnee, Mr. Garner found bottle tops, a door hinge and other small household items. He said the field work made the historic research come to life.

        “This kind of expanded my mind about people who helped the Underground Railroad,” he said. “It helps me understand my own race a little more.”

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