Settlers in Nicodemus, Kansas and Exodusters

18thVirginia

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Sep 8, 2012
We read and discuss Reconstruction in the South and sometimes reference the Great Migrations that occurred as black people left the South. One place that some journeyed to was Nicodemus, Kansas. As situations in the South didn't improve as much as expected during the Civil War, some black citizens looked around for other opportunities. A land developer named W. R. Hill started trying to attract black settlers from Tennessee and Kentucky to come out to Kansas and acquire land through homesteading it.

Joining Hill in the efforts to establish this new community was a black man, Rev. W. H. Smith. Together they formed the Nicodemus Town Company and began to solicit new settlers through handbills distributed throughout the South. One of the men who handed out these flyers was called the "Moses of the Colored Exodus" and those black refugees from the South came to be known as "Exodusters."

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Benjamin "Pap" Singleton, a former slave who traveled the South handing out handbills advertising settlement in Nicodemus.
 
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Some 308 people arrived in Nicodemus in 1877 and by 1880, the community had 500 residents. Many who took the train out to the nearest community, which was 55 miles away, were disappointed with conditions in Kansas and chose, like other Kansas newcomers to return to Tennessee or Kentucky. Some were distraught at the idea of living in a dugout.

This photo shows a dugout which was used by the Nicodemus settlers as a place to overnight when they traveled to another town for supplies. The distance was so far, they often spent the night here.

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Refugees on Levee, 1897. Carroll's Art Gallery. Photomural from gelatin-silver print Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress (105)

Exodusters at St. Louis on their way to Kansas.

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Settlers at Nicodemus
 
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There were various explanations for the migration of African Americans from the South.

"The attention of the country during the past year has been attracted to the movements among the African-American population, chiefly in the states bordering on the Mississippi River. There was no appearance of organization or system among these people -- their irregularity and absence of preparation indicating spontaneity and earnestness. Bands moved from the plantations to the Mississippi River, and then to
St. Louis and other cities, with no defined purpose, except to reach a state west of the Mississippi River, where they expected to enjoy a new prosperity. Their movements received the name of the 'Exodus.'" Appleton's Annual Cyclopedia for 1879

Governor Stone of Mississippi gave the following explanation in 1880 to the state legislature:

"A partial failure of the cotton crop in portions of the state, and the un-remunerative prices received for it, created a feeling of discontent among plantation laborers, which, together with other extraneous influences, caused some to abandon their crops in the spring to seek homes in the West."

http://www.legendsofkansas.com/exodusters.html

1879 was a big year for the exodus of black settlers from the South, asHenry King, then postmaster at Topeka, wrote to Scribner's Magazine:

"There are, at this writing, from 15,000 to 20,000 colored people in Kansas who have settled there during the last twelve months -- 30 percent of them from Mississippi; 20 percent from Texas; 15 percent from Tennessee; 10 percent from Louisiana; 5 percent each from Alabama and Georgia, and the remainder from the other Southern states. Of this number, about one-third are supplied with teams and farming tools, and maybe expected to become self-sustaining in another year. . . The area of land bought or entered by the freedmen during their first year in Kansas is about 20,000 acres, of which they have plowed and fitted for grain-growing 3,000 acres. They have built some 300 cabins and dugouts, counting those which yet lack roofs and floors; and in the way of personal property, their accumulations, outside of what has been given to them, will aggregate perhaps $30,000. It is within bounds to say that their total gains for the year, the surplus proceeds of their efforts, amount to $40,000, or about $2.25 per capita."

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Exodusters
 
Williana Hickman was dismayed at her first view of Nicodemus:

“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.”

Williana and her husband, Reverend Daniel Hickman, would stay in Nicodemus and organize the First Baptist Church in a dugout with a soddy above it. The church would evolve into a limestone sanctuary, then to a stuccoed structure and in 1975 to the building which still stands.

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First Baptist Church, Nicodemus, LoC
 
In 1888, the railroads would bypass Nicodemus for a town 6 miles away and the settlement would begin a decline.

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Nicodemus, 1953
 
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@huskerblitz shared these photos of Exodusters from black towns in Nebraska.

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Perhaps @huskerblitz has more information about these towns.

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The Shores family near Westerville, Custer County, Nebraska
 

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Front Page of the Nicodemus Cyclone, 1888

https://blog.genealogybank.com/nicodemus-kansas-the-history-of-americas-black-towns.html

The Genealogy Bank blog notes that at the filing of the Emancipation Proclamation, only 8% of blacks lived outside the South, but that in the 1870s, 60,000 settlers moved to black towns in Kansas and Oklahoma.

I would like to see that blog. I don't believe it. If that many moved in, most moved out pretty swiftly. Where were all these black towns??????

Are there more photos somewhere? The Nicodemus settler I studied was Benjamin Davenport and I would love to have a photo. He kept the land but moved out in his later years to Norton. I would imagine most others were gone then too.
 
I would like to see that blog. I don't believe it. If that many moved in, most moved out pretty swiftly. Where were all these black towns??????

Are there more photos somewhere? The Nicodemus settler I studied was Benjamin Davenport and I would love to have a photo. He kept the land but moved out in his later years to Norton. I would imagine most others were gone then too.

The Genealogy Bank blog is at the link in the post you replied to. It's at http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/african/afam008.html.

I was a little surprised at the 60,000 figure as well, but read somewhere else that 15,000 African Americans came to Kansas in 1879. Another source mentioned that some of them settled close to Kansas City, Kansas. A Nebraska historical site mentions that the 1870s and 80s featured a lot more rain than usual for the prairie states, which meant that settlers had great difficulty when they returned to their usual arid state in about 1888.
 
So, I found this article from the Topeka paper that details some of the other black settlements during Reconstruction and slightly later and listings of the number of African American immigrants from the South. http://cjonline.com/life/2010-04-17/blacks_found_hope_in_post_war_ks#

BLACK MIGRATION TO KANSAS

Census yearBlack population (excluding mixed race)

1860 (Operation of Underground Railroad)160

1865 (Year after Civil War ended)11,953

1870 (Migration begins)18,077

1875 (Migration slows)19,527

1880 (Great Exodus to Kansas)33,185

1885 (Exodus continues)39,276

1890Lost data

1900 (Migration disperses to west and north) 41,012

1905 (Opening of Oklahoma Territory)19,332

Source: Ustaine Talley, Topeka resident and public historian
 
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