Nicodemus, Kansas — 1877, the Exoduster Colony

Summary

In the summer of 1877, twelve years after emancipation and one year after federal troops began withdrawing from the South, a handful of Black men in Kentucky put their names to a town company and aimed it at a treeless stretch of the high Kansas plains. They called the place Nicodemus, after the legend of an enslaved African who had purchased his own freedom — a name that announced, before a single sod was turned, exactly what the venture was about. Kansas was the chosen ground for a reason: it was John Brown's old battlefield, a free state soaked in abolitionist memory, and for thousands of formerly enslaved people it shimmered as a kind of biblical promised land just over the western horizon.

The first colonists came up from Lexington and the Bluegrass counties in the autumn of 1877 and again in the spring of 1878, riding the rails to Ellis and then walking or wagoning the last thirty-odd miles north to the Solomon River valley. What they found was not the wooded, watered country the recruiting circulars had implied. It was open grass, hard wind, and almost no timber for building. The promoters' handbills had promised more than the land could give, and the gap between the promise and the prairie nearly broke the colony in its first months. The newcomers dug into the earth itself — into dugouts and burrows scraped from the riverbanks and hillsides — and waited out a winter many of them barely believed they would survive.

Nicodemus is remembered today as the oldest and only remaining all-Black town west of the Mississippi from the Reconstruction era, and the centerpiece of the wider "Exoduster" migration of 1879–1880, when tens of thousands of African Americans fled the collapsing protections of the post-war South for Kansas. Other Black colonies were attempted across the plains; almost all of them faded. Nicodemus did not vanish, even after the railroad it had staked its future on chose to lay its tracks elsewhere. The town shrank, but it never quite died, held together by the descendants of the founders and by an annual homecoming that still gathers families home each summer.

Its story is at once a homestead story and something larger — a test of whether free land under the 1862 Homestead Act would extend, in fact and not only in law, to people who had themselves been held as property a dozen years before. The land office at Kirwin recorded their entries; the patents bear their names. What the diaries and reminiscences of Nicodemus preserve is not a triumphal frontier myth but the harder, truer record of people who arrived poor, were lied to about the country, nearly starved in their first winter, and stayed anyway.

Timeline

The Claim

The push out of Kentucky came from men who had read the meaning of Reconstruction's collapse early. Benjamin "Pap" Singleton of Tennessee is the best-known of the Black emigration promoters who urged a flight to Kansas, and his circulars helped set the wider Exoduster movement in motion. Nicodemus itself was organized by its own Black founders working with a white land speculator named W. R. Hill. The Nicodemus Town Company was formed on April 18, 1877 by seven men, six of them African American; the Black minister W. H. Smith served as its first president and Hill as treasurer, with the Rev. Simon Roundtree among the early settlers and Hill providing the promotion that pulled families out of the Bluegrass counties and pointed them toward Graham County.

The draw was simple and enormous: land of one's own, and a town where Black families would govern themselves, free of the violence and disenfranchisement spreading across the redeemed South. Under the Homestead Act a settler could claim 160 acres for a small filing fee and five years of residence and improvement. For people who a decade earlier could not legally own themselves, a quarter-section with a patent in their own name was a revolution measured in acres. The recruiting handbills leaned hard on that hope, painting the Solomon valley in colors brighter than the dry reality.

The first wave of about 350 colonists reached the townsite on September 17, 1877, having come by train to the railhead and then overland to the river; a second large wave followed in 1878. Williana Hickman, who came with her husband the Rev. Daniel Hickman in the spring of 1878, left the colony's most famous arrival account. As they neared the spot, she recalled, the men shouted, "There is Nicodemus!" Being very sick, she "hailed this news with gladness," but when she looked she saw only grass: "I looked with all the eyes I had. I said, 'Where is Nicodemus? I don't see it.' My husband pointed out various smokes coming out of the ground and said, 'That is Nicodemus.' The families lived in dugouts. The scenery was not at all inviting, and I began to cry." She and Daniel Hickman stayed and went on to help organize the colony's First Baptist Church.

Building In

There was almost no wood and little stone, so the first Nicodemus homes were not even the sod houses of plains legend but holes — dugouts carved back into the riverbanks and hillsides, roofed with brush, grass, and earth, with a stovepipe pushed up through the dirt above. That is what Williana Hickman saw smoking out of the prairie. A dugout was dark and damp and shared its walls with insects and snakes, but it held heat against the wind and could be made by hands that owned nothing but a shovel and their own labor. As families could afford it, they cut blocks of the tough prairie sod and stacked them into above-ground "soddies," the standard treeless-plains house, with sod walls two feet thick and a roof that leaked mud when it rained and dust when it didn't.

The first winter, 1877–1878, tested everyone. The settlers had arrived too late in the season to raise a crop, provisions ran short, and the cold came down on people still learning the country. Accounts from the colony describe families surviving on what little they had carried and on the goodwill of neighbors, including local Osage hunters and nearby settlers who are credited in some reminiscences with sharing game and helping the newcomers through. Several discouraged colonists turned back east that winter and the following spring, unwilling to face a second one.

Those who stayed broke the land. Plains sod, matted with the roots of centuries of buffalo grass, had to be cut and turned with a heavy breaking plow before anything could be planted — backbreaking work that opened only a few acres a season for most families. The early years brought poor crops as the settlers learned dryland farming, but Nicodemus slowly took root. By 1880 the colony and its surrounding farms counted several hundred residents; the town platted streets and lots and grew into a genuine commercial center for the Black farming community spread across the township, with churches, a school, stores, and its own newspapers in the boom years of the 1880s.

Proving Up

Proving up on the high plains meant outlasting the climate, and the climate did not relent. Western Kansas in these decades cycled through drought years that withered the corn and wind that stripped the topsoil. The grasshopper plagues that had devastated Kansas in 1874 left a long memory, and crop failures in dry years pushed families into debt with merchants and mortgage holders. Prairie fire was a constant dread — a wall of flame driven by the wind could cross miles of dry grass and take a soddy, a hayrick, and a year's work in minutes. Isolation pressed on the spirit as hard as drought pressed on the crops; the nearest large towns and the land office were a long haul away, and a sick child or a hard birth might be days from any doctor.

What carried Nicodemus through was institution-building and sheer communal stubbornness. The settlers organized churches almost immediately — Baptist and African Methodist Episcopal congregations anchored the community — and a school, a benevolent society, and the machinery of self-government. In the booming mid-1880s the town swelled with new arrivals and businesses and confidently expected the railroad, the single thing that could make a prairie town permanent, to come through and crown its success. Town lots sold; promoters predicted Nicodemus would become the county seat and a regional hub.

The blow that broke the boom was not drought but the railroad's decision. In the late 1880s the line — built by interests that bypassed the town — laid its tracks a few miles to the south rather than through Nicodemus, and a rival town on the rail siphoned off the commerce. Without the railroad, the merchants and the momentum drained away within a few years; businesses closed or moved, and the population that had reached into the hundreds began a long decline. But the farm families who had proved up their claims held their patents and their land. The town as a commercial center faded; the community of landowning Black families around it endured, and Nicodemus remained, against every odd, a place that its people refused to abandon.

What’s There Now

Nicodemus never disappeared, and that is its quiet triumph. The commercial boom ended with the railroad's snub, the population shrank from hundreds to a few dozen, but the town held on as the oldest and only surviving all-Black town west of the Mississippi founded during Reconstruction. Five historic buildings still stand at the heart of it — the township hall, the First Baptist Church, the African Methodist Episcopal church, the old St. Francis Hotel, and the District No. 1 schoolhouse — each tied to the founding families and the institutions they raised.

In 1996 Congress established Nicodemus National Historic Site, administered by the National Park Service, to preserve those buildings and tell the story of the Exodusters and the Black homesteading experience. The site is unusual among national parks in that it protects a living community, not a frozen ruin: descendants of the original settlers still live in and around Nicodemus and farm the surrounding land. The Park Service interprets the dugouts, the migration, and the lives of named founders rather than a generic frontier.

Each summer the town holds its Emancipation Day / Homecoming celebration, a tradition reaching back over a century, when families descended from the 1877 and 1878 colonists return from across the country to the place their ancestors refused to leave. What stands at the site now is therefore not only old buildings but a continuity — the same families, the same churches, the same ground first burrowed into when smoke rose straight out of the prairie and Williana Hickman wept at the sight of it.

Lessons

References

• Nicodemus, Kansas Wikipedia
• Nicodemus National Historic Site — History & Culture U.S. National Park Service
• Nicodemus Kansas Historical Society (Kansapedia)
• Exodusters U.S. National Park Service