The Long Stand of Nicodemus

The road out of Hill City rolls north across Graham County. Fenceposts, windbreaks, gates. The fields run wheat in June, sorghum in the fall, and for a long stretch the county road is a single seam between pale pastures. There is no approach, no official announcement until a small white church steeple appears in the windshield. That is Nicodemus.

The town is a cluster of old buildings on the high flat plain. It is not a ghost town. A handful of people live here, in houses whose porches face the open road. The National Park Service interprets the place for whoever comes. On an ordinary afternoon, the only sounds are the wind and a truck downshifting somewhere beyond the fields.

Freedom, surveyed and platted

In the years after the Civil War, the former Confederate states set out to rebuild the old labor system under new names. Black Americans who wanted more than a share of the crop began looking west. Kansas had entered the Union as a free state, had been fought over by slavery's friends and enemies, and still offered a place where a Black man's homestead claim carried legal weight. The Homestead Act of 1862 offered 160 acres to any adult citizen willing to improve the land. For people to whom land had been forbidden, the number was an open door.

In Lexington, Kentucky, a group of families organized a town company and advertised a future in Kansas. The message spread through churches and word of mouth: a place on the high plains, governed by its own people, with land under their own names. Some came by train; some walked the final miles. The first winter they lived in dugouts cut into the earth, covering the openings with sod. The prairie was unforgiving. Some turned back. Enough stayed.

By 1877 the townsite was laid out on the open prairie. The name has never been fully explained, whether from the Bible or from a poem or from a historical figure no one agrees on. The uncertainty suits the place. What matters is that the name belongs to a town founded by Black settlers and kept by their descendants ever since.

The railroad did not arrive

The first settlers had to learn the weather the way sailors learn a sea. Blizzards came off the high plains and buried the dugouts. Summer sun baked the ground to a hardness that fought the plow. Yet the colony grew, and by the early 1880s, Nicodemus had enough people to support the ordinary machinery of small-town life: mail, worship, education, commerce.

Wooden buildings went up on the wide streets. Families planted gardens and brought in crops of wheat and corn. The A.M.E. Church took shape, paid for in coins from harvests and day work. The church was more than a building. It was the center of everything else—the funerals, the weddings, the Emancipation Day gatherings, the arguments and reconciliations that make a town. The church building that stands today was raised by that first generation, and it remains the hinge of the place.

At its height in the 1880s, Nicodemus had a bank, a hotel, general stores, a newspaper, and several churches. It was an African American town in a mostly white county, and it held its own. Then the railroad made its decision. The lines that had built and killed so many Kansas towns chose another route, running through a nearby town instead. The effect was what it usually was on the plains: freight went elsewhere, new settlers went elsewhere, and Nicodemus lost its momentum.

The bank closed. The newspaper stopped. People packed up and left for places with rail service and jobs. A handful of families stayed on their land. The same story played out across dozens of Black towns in the West, sites founded with hope on homesteads and then abandoned, their histories reduced to a roadside marker. Nicodemus is different. It is not a roadside marker. It is still a town.

The long homecoming

The town shrank, but it never emptied. The people who stayed kept the church alive and the township hall in use. Their farms held the original claims, and their children learned the names of the people who had come before. Decades passed, and no one tried to force the town into a museum. It went on being lived in.

In 1996, Congress established Nicodemus National Historic Site to preserve the town and tell the story of the Black settlement of the plains. The National Park Service works alongside the descendants of that first colony. Restored buildings, a visitor center, and a walking route make the story visible, but the story was never entirely invisible. It had been carried in the town all along.

Now, on a summer weekend, especially during Emancipation Day, a celebration held for more than a hundred years, the town fills with people. Descendants of the original settlers drive in from a dozen states. The A.M.E. Church opens its doors. Chairs go out onto the grass. Stories come out of pockets and memories: names, weather, crops, the road from Lexington.

The old buildings are not restored into a stillness. The place is lived with. The street plan remains where it was laid. The church stands where the congregation raised it. The prairie has tried for more than a century to take the town back, and the town has kept answering.

What keeps Nicodemus on the map is not the good fortune of location. It is the particular stubbornness of people who had been denied a future, and who came to a flat empty place and built one. The railroad chose elsewhere. The seasons are hard. The population would not fill a city block.

But on the high plains of Graham County, Kansas, the town is still there, small and exposed, because the people who built it meant for it to last.

Photos: Beth Holt (Didymop), Ser Amantio di Nicolao (CC BY-SA 4.0)