Nicodemus: A statement on Kansas' high plains

Nicodemus is one of those places that requires a commitment. One must take a slower road, rattle off many miles without another vehicle, and cross little towns that rarely spy an out-of-state license plate. These little commerce centers for the vast farms surrounding them. But out on the South Fork of the Solomon River, Nicodemus is one town not like the others. 

Nicodemus was founded for Black Americans, former slaves looking for a new life out of the South. The Nicodemus National Historic Site protects a small community, the first Black community founded west of the Mississippi and the only one to survive into the 21st century. 

Many Black communities were founded throughout the South after the Civil War, but Reconstruction was harsh and cruel, and many former slaves turned into sharecroppers for the same people who once enslaved them. Nicodemus offered a fresh start in abolitionist Kansas. 

I kept worrying I missed the small town when I left the interstate and cross the rolling landscape of northwest Kansas. Trees were sporadic outside of river corridors, although I was rewarded with a view of the largest turkey flock I have ever seen. Maybe 50 turkeys loitered in an empty farm field on the edge of a cottonwood grove. I had to stop and marvel. 

 Soon enough I found Nicodemus. History aside, it fit the template for a small Kansas farming town. The original 165-acre townsite received National Historic Landmark status in the 1970s, then joined the National Park Service in 1996, with the park district extending to five historic structures. Before the railroad and the Dust Bowl, the initial town conditions led many would-be homesteaders to return to the South. With few trees, sod houses dug directly into the ground formed the earliest form of Nicodemus. 

After building a small community on the hardscrabble Plains, the quest for a stop on a railroad line became make or break for Nicodemus. Unfortunately, race likely factored heavily into the rail route across northwestern Kansas.
 

The rail route around Nicodemus would be comical if not for its implications. The route makes an arc around the town. While it looks like the railroad chose to go through a different town, Bogue didn’t exist and was formed by the railroad, ostensibly to keep Nicodemus off the rails. The population boom never came, even as the town endured. 

There were other Black communities, especially in Kansas, where abolitionist sentiment ran strong and Black homesteaders sought new live after the Civil War and Reconstruction. East of Greeley on the Colorado Plains lie the remains of Deerfield, one of two dozen settlements in the Centennial State. The Dust Bowl of the 1930s prove the death-knell for communities on the Plains regardless of color, and Nicodemus was the only Black community to survive. 

A small group of historic buildings form the park site. The Nicodemus Community Hall from 1939 serves as park headquarters and the visitor center, with exhibits detailing its history and a series of short films about descendants of the original homesteaders who still live in Nicodemus and farm the land. 

The site includes two churches – The African Methodist Episcopal Church from 1885, and the First Baptist Church from 1907.The St. Charles Hotel dates to 1881 and has fallen into some disrepair. It speaks to the need for small hotels and boarding rooms at a time when transportation moved much slower. 

Nicodemus is still a living community of Black farmers. Private residences surround the historic buildings. It was silent at 10 a.m. on a sunny but cold Saturday. I stayed on the streets and away from the private homes. A large park lies along the U.S. highway, mostly used by truckers taking road breaks. 

Miles south of town when the railroad line comes into Bogue, one can wonder what might have happened had Nicodemus received that train stop. Hays is the biggest town in northwest Kansas at 20,000 residents, but the railroad changed fortunes. 

Smoky Hills

Shortly after Nicodemus, I passed the town of Damar, settled by French-Canadians and boasting a large Catholic church. It didn't look all that different.

Through the Smoky Hills, my thoughts never strayed from Nicodemus. The promise did not hold as the railroad favored its own interests, yet the families stayed. That its original buildings have joined the National Park Service are a testament to the Black farmers still working the fields that brought their ancestors out of the Southeast and slavery's stigmas. 

Still, Nicodemus is no ghost town, and its NPS status ensures the former slaves who founded the town won’t go forgotten.