Nicodemus, Kansas — 1877, the Exoduster Colony

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.