The emancipation of Nicodemus

Natural History, July-August, 1998 by William H. Wiggins, Jr.

A Kansas homecoming honors black pioneers.

Friday

12:00 noon. A large "Welcome to Kansas" sign greets me as I drive from the Kansas City International Airport on a westward journey into American history. I am headed for Nicodemus, the oldest surviving town west of the Mississippi founded by African Americans. The occasion is that pioneer village's August 1 Emancipation Celebration, a well-attended homecoming.

Kansas has a rich abolitionist heritage. During the 1850s, it was called Bleeding Kansas because of the fierce fighting between those who wanted this territory to be a slave state and those who did not. (Kansas entered the Union as a free state in 1861.) After the Civil War, tens of thousands of African Americans, mostly from the South, were among the settlers who created new communities here. Nicodemus, founded in Graham County in 1877, was one of them. Other all-black Kansas communities included two established by Benjamin "Pap" Singleton, a former runaway slave from Tennessee. From 1874 to 1879, he led some 1,100 Tennessee ex-slaves to Kansas to found the Baxter Springs colony (in Cherokee County) and the Dunlap colony (in Morris County). Like other homesteaders, blacks came in search of independence and the opportunity to become whatever their grit and fate would allow.

12:45 P.M. Interstate 70 takes me through Lawrence, once a station on the state's Underground Railroad. The conductors included the militant abolitionist John Brown, later hanged for leading the 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia.

2:00 P.M. I pass through Topeka, birthplace of the Nicodemus Town Company, established April 18, 1877. The prime movers were William H. Smith, president, a black minister from Clarksville, Tennessee, who had settled in Graham County in 1874; and W. R. Hill, treasurer, a white, twenty-seven-year-old "homestead locator and town-site promoter" from Covington, Indiana. Hill, who recruited the settlers, collected a five-dollar fee from each one--two dollars for government filing charges, two dollars for Hill's commission for locating the homesteader on his parcel of land, and a dollar for the company treasury, to be used for the common needs of the township. The name Nicodemus referred to a legendary slave, said to have arrived in America aboard the second slave ship from Africa and to have later purchased his freedom.

6:30 P.M. Having crossed the invisible divide into more sparsely populated western Kansas, the highway skirts Russell, birthplace of Senator Robert Dole. On January 23, 1996, Senator Dole introduced a bill to make Nicodemus a National Historic Site within the National Park Service.

7:30 P.M. I reach Hays, my layover, forty miles southeast of Nicodemus. This was originally Fort Hays, the temporary station of the "buffalo soldiers" from 1881 to 1885. The Cheyenne had dubbed the black cavalrymen buffalo soldiers because the texture of their hair resembled that of a buffalo's mane.

Saturday

8:00 A.M. Having traveled west from Hays and then north--finally off the interstate--I enter Hill City, county seat of Graham county. Hill City was founded in 1878, also by promoter W. R. Hill. The Pomeroy Inn (named in honor of James P. Pomeroy, an Atchison coal dealer and land speculator who invested heavily in the development of the town) is one of the gathering places for homecoming celebrants making their annual pilgrimage to nearby Nicodemus. Full of anticipation, they mill about the lobby.

9:30 A.M. I arrive in Nicodemus, whose permanent resident population numbers about forty. Situated at the intersection of State Highway 24 and a dusty country road, the motley collection of houses and buildings huddle around the town's water tower. They say Hill chose the spot because it was where he awoke to a beautiful sunrise--or where he was awakened and frightened by a big snake.

Nearly 350 blacks from Lexington and Georgetown, Kentucky, arrived here on September 17, 1877, and about 150 came from Kentucky and Tennessee in the spring of 1878. A group of 50 Mississippi blacks followed in the spring of 1879, and 25 more migrated later that year, In June 1880, the federal census reported 260 blacks living in Nicodemus township and another 224 in Hill City and Wild Horse townships, making up about 11 percent of the county's population.

In contrast to the great urban migration of the first half of the twentieth century--in which primarily young, southern black males searched for work in northern factories--the trek to Kansas involved whole families. "When we got in sight of Nicodemus," recalled Williana Hickman, a member of the Georgetown contingent, interviewed in 1937 at the age of ninety, "the men shouted, `There is Nicodemus!' Being very sick, I hailed this news with gladness. 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. We landed and once again struck tents. The scenery to me was not at all inviting, and I began to cry."