The Spirit of Nicodemus

Nicodemus, Kan. was designated a National Historic Site in 1996 because of its role in African-American frontier history.

Birthday banners proclaiming “Happy 90th” stretch like wallpaper border around Ora Switzer’s kitchen and living room, where they’ve remained for nearly 10 years. “I saved this spot over the door for my 100th,” says Switzer, who reaches that big day on Feb. 24 and is the oldest resident in Nicodemus, Kan., a three-square-block town of just 27 people.

Such endurance is the hallmark of the last remaining western town founded by African-Americans. Nicodemus, some 42 miles northwest of Hays (pop. 20,013), was designated a National Historic Site in 1996 because of its role in African-American frontier history.

Switzer and most of Nicodemus’ other residents are descendants of 350 freed slaves who journeyed from Kentucky after the Civil War to establish the town of Nicodemus in 1877. Promised free land and self-government, the pioneers came with a handful of belongings and hearts full of dreams and hopes.

W.R. Hill, a white land developer, and the Rev. W.H. Smith, an African-American Kentucky minister, organized the Nicodemus Town Co., named for the ballad Wake Nicodemus! by abolitionist Henry Clay Work, and platted the town along the Solomon River. At Kentucky church meetings, they recruited colonists with romanticized tales of Kansas—the Promised Land.

Nicodemus’ first residents traveled by rail to the end of the tracks in Ellis, Kan., (pop. 1,873) then walked or rode horseback or in wagons the last 50 miles. When the settlers arrived at the townsite, they discovered the truth of the Promised Land had been stretched as far as the unending prairie.

“It was so barren, you could see for up to 10 miles in one direction,” says Angela Bates-Tompkins, a native and founder of the Nicodemus Historical Society. “The land was so stark they called it the Great American Desert.”

Stubby buffalo grass grew on the high plains of northwestern Kansas, but few trees other than a smattering of cottonwoods and elms grew along the Solomon River. “My grandmother came here in 1877, and they got busy and built a dugout where she had her first baby, Mother’s brother,” Switzer says.

Those first years, the Nicodemus colonists, like scores of other prairie settlers who homesteaded treeless landscapes, lived in those dugouts—holes built into hillsides or the ground, typically measuring about 14 feet by 15 feet.

The pioneers turned the sod by hand with hoes and spades and planted corn and wheat. They burned corncobs, dried cow chips, and sunflower stalks for fuel. Some built sod houses by stacking sod “bricks” 2 feet thick for walls.

“A lot knew each other from the plantations, and their spirit of survival was strong,” Bates-Tompkins says. “Their isolation bound them together. It builds strong character living in a rural environment.”

Nicodemus is typical of dozens of towns settled by Exodusters, the name given to the 15,000 former slaves who made an exodus from the South into Kansas during the Reconstruction period after the Civil War.

The town prospered and by the mid-1880s could boast two newspapers, three general stores, three churches, a number of small hotels, an ice cream parlor, literary society, a bank, and livery stables. To continue flourishing, however, Nicodemus needed a railroad.

Despite town boosters petitioning rail officials, the Union Pacific Railroad veered four miles south, creating the town of Bogue (pop. 179) from a railroad construction camp in 1888. “Several (wooden-frame) businesses in Nicodemus just literally picked up and moved (by mule) to Bogue,” Bates-Tompkins says.

Remarkably, Nicodemus clung to life despite the railroad bypass, severe dust storms of the 1930s, and the Great Depression. Today, it remains the only surviving all-African-American frontier town west of the Mississippi, says Reggie Murray, park ranger for the Nicodemus National Historic Site, a unit of the National Park System. At 39, he’s the youngest resident and the only one not related to the town’s settlers.

“This is all family,” Murray says. “If Miss Ora isn’t feeling well, then Miss Ernestine looks after her and cooks for her and vice versa.”

Except for Murray and Gil Alexander, 44, who farms for a living, Nicodemus has become a close-knit retirement community of those who have left farming, the railroad, or jobs in nearby towns.

Good memories

Standing in the middle of Washington Street in front of Town Hall, it’s possible to see most of the 160-acre town with its modest houses scattered among the five historic buildings that make up the historic site. Within a three-block area are the 1907 First Baptist Church, organized in 1877 in a dugout on this site; the 1885 African Methodist Episcopal Church; the 1878 St. Francis Hotel; the 1918 Nicodemus School District No. 1; and the 1939 Nicodemus Township Hall. The park service is headquartered in Township Hall, built from native limestone as a Works Progress Administration (WPA) project.

Most days, the prairie town is quiet except for three resident dogs, and an occasional car, but on the last weekend in July, 600 or so descendants and friends arrive from all over the United States for the Emancipation Celebration.

“That first year, the settlers were just busy surviving the winter,” Murray says, “but they’ve held the Emancipation Celebration every year since.” Originally, the celebration marked the emancipation of slaves from the West Indies but has evolved into a huge homecoming and family reunion with lots of hugging and story sharing.

“We have a parade with little kids on tractors, floats, the Buffalo soldiers, and saddle clubs,” says resident Alvina Alexander, 73. Festivities include a fashion show, church services, games, and food.

“Homecoming is a big time because these old memories are instilled into the younger kids,” says Kim Thomas, 51, of nearby Stockton (pop. 1,558). “Everyone comes back. My grandkids from Philadelphia look forward to coming.”

Thomas’ grandparents, Ola and Henry Wilson, were early settlers, and family members donated their house as headquarters for the Nicodemus Historical Society. Ola Wilson was town historian, and her manual typewriter is among the society’s treasures.

“I have good childhood memories,” Thomas says. “I remember quilting with Grandma each Wednesday afternoon at the mission society meeting at the old Baptist Church.” She recalls Saturday night dances at the American Legion, fishing trips in a horse-drawn wagon, and sleeping on wintry nights under so many layers of heavy quilts that she couldn’t roll over.

A homecoming staple is Ernestine Van Duvall’s barbecued ribs. Van Duvall, 83, and the community’s second-oldest resident, started working at Julia’s Café in Nicodemus when she was 9. One of her favorite jobs, she recalls, was cutting newspapers into fancy doilies to line the candy and dessert cases. Even then, she knew she wanted to own her own café.

Like many Nicodemus residents, Van Duvall moved away to find work. In the 1960s, she operated Ernestine’s Barbecue in Pasadena, Calif., where her niece, Bates-Tompkins, helped cook and serve after school and during summers.

When Van Duvall retired, she moved home to Nicodemus and operated Ernestine’s Barbecue from 1975 until hanging up her apron in 1985.

Last May, Bates-Tompkins picked up those apron strings of history and opened Ernestine’s Barbecue in nearby Bogue where a building was available. Van Duvall bakes all the fruit cobblers and often entertains on piano.

Old black-and-white photos on the café walls chronicle the history of Ernestine’s Barbecue. Bates-Tompkins uses all her aunt’s locally favorite recipes, such as baked beans spiced with cinnamon and potato salad with sweet pickle relish.

“If it weren’t for Angela, Nicodemus would be a zero,” says Alvina Alexander as she watches her energetic cousin bustle from the kitchen with another platter of ribs. “She has such determination.”

The weekend café is just one more way that Bates-Tompkins shows her nonstop devotion to sharing and saving the history of Nicodemus. When she returned home in 1990 after living and working in Washington, D.C., and Denver, the educator began researching African-American frontier towns and Nicodemus, in particular, and found that they barely were a footnote in history.

“I’d find maybe one paragraph in textbooks,” she says. “We weren’t written into the history books, but we’re part of the settling of the frontier. Blacks participated in the Western expansion as black sheriffs, cowboys, and stagecoach drivers … and that’s what Nicodemus represents.”

Not only did she campaign to get the town listed as a national landmark, but she founded the Nicodemus Historical Society and publishes its newsletter. She also publishes a free town newspaper, the Nicodemus Western Cyclone II, with current news and reprints of actual pages from the 1886 Western Cyclone.

Her husband, Barrie Tompkins, is a full-time farrier, and the couple operates the Nicodemus Livery Co., giving wagon tours of Nicodemus and the Solomon Valley. When busloads of schoolchildren arrive for tours, Bates-Tompkins greets them and tells the story of her great-great-grandfather, John Samuels, and the other former slaves who came looking for the Promised Land, found hardship, but didn’t give up. They stayed and helped settle the West.

“People often ask me why I’m living here,” Bates-Tompkins says of the little town in the middle of a prairie that stretches in every direction as big as freedom.

“This is home. We have a real community here with values and history. In Nicodemus, we know who we are.”

Marti Attoun is a freelance writer in Joplin, Mo.

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