Nicodemus: The Town That Refused to Disappear

In the summer of eighteen seventy-seven, a group of Black homesteaders from Kentucky stepped off a train in western Kansas and looked around at the high plains grassland. They had been recruited by a Tennessee man named W.R. Hill who had told them about land in Graham County, Kansas, where they could farm for themselves on soil no one else wanted. They named their settlement Nicodemus, after an enslaved man who, according to tradition, purchased his own freedom and became a leader in his community.

The first winter nearly finished them. The Kansas high plains in January of eighteen seventy-eight are not a landscape that forgives unpreparedness. Families survived in dugouts, partly below ground, insulated from wind by earth. They ate whatever Osage neighbors shared with them.

They stayed. By the late eighteen eighties, Nicodemus had grown to approximately seven hundred residents at its peak, with a school, churches, a hotel, and businesses. It was one of dozens of Black communities founded on the Kansas plains by Exodusters, the roughly twenty-five thousand to forty thousand Black Americans who had migrated from the post-Reconstruction South to Kansas between eighteen seventy-seven and eighteen eighty.

Then the railroad bypassed Nicodemus. The Missouri Pacific routed its tracks through a nearby town instead. Businesses followed the railroad. Most of Nicodemus's residents left.

Some stayed. Families whose grandparents had survived that first winter on the high plains did not leave when the railroad did. A small community has held Nicodemus continuously for nearly one hundred fifty years. The National Park Service established a National Historic Site here in nineteen ninety-six, designating Nicodemus as the only surviving Black settlement in the American West from the Exodus movement.

Every July, descendants and community members hold the Emancipation Homecoming celebration, which has continued every year without interruption.