Great Secrets of Our National Parks
Some of the best findings by accidental anthropologists and studied experts.
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By: TW Editors 06/01/2008
Nicodemus, KS
Exodusters’ Promised Land Out West
Dodge City and Wichita cowtowns. Forts Larned and Hays. The Mahaffie stage stop in Olathe. We know those Kansas sites, but how many of you have heard of Nicodemus, located an hour northwest of Hays?
Probably not too many, yet Angela Bates-Tompkins is doing as much as she can to spread her secret far and wide about the only remaining all-black town west of the Mississippi River today.
Two years before the “Black Exodus” of 1879 that welcomed the heaviest migration of slave refugees into free state Kansas, black minister Rev. W.H. Smith and white land promoter W.R. Hill founded Nicodemus. Their flyers encouraged southern blacks, mainly from Kentucky and Tennessee, to settle there.
Willina Hickman, one of the early Exodusters who built up this “promised land,” recalled her arrival in 1878: “When we got in sight of Nicodemus 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…. The scenery was not at all inviting, and I began to cry.”
Despite the incredible odds faced by settlers turning a desert sprinkled with stubby buffalo grass into an agricultural field of corn and wheat, Nicodemus survived. The town’s population has dwindled to about 40, but every July, many descendants of the original town settlers gather here to celebrate Emancipation Day.
Thanks to Angela, a descendant of settlers herself, five historic buildings, dating as far back as 1881, comprise the historic site maintained today by the park service. Since 1988, when she organized and served as the first president of the Nicodemus Historical Society, she has worked to preserve and interpret the town’s history, eventually earning a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005.
While you visit the site, please respect the privacy of local residents.
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