Nicodemus, Kansas

The photographs on this page, brought to life.

Washington Street about 1885, with the first stone church and the Williams general store. Copy of a historic photograph, Historic American Buildings Survey. Library of Congress.

The federal troops left the South in 1877. That same year, six Black men and one white man organized a town company out on the Solomon River. The Nicodemus Town Company was formed on the eighteenth of April 1877. W. H. Smith was president, S. P. Roundtree secretary, and W. R. Hill — the one white incorporator, a land man from Indiana — treasurer. They took the name from a song, Wake Nicodemus, and put it on a recruiting broadside that promised the Great Solomon Valley. Thirty colonists came out from Topeka on the thirtieth of July. Sixty families came from Lexington, Kentucky in September, and sixty families turned around and went back east the day after they saw it. Willianna Hickman arrived the following spring and asked where the town was. Her husband pointed at smoke coming out of the ground. There was no timber. People lived in dugouts. They stayed anyway. By 1878 there were six or seven hundred people there, more than any town north of the Kansas Pacific line. By 1886 the town had a bank, four general stores, three groceries, four hotels, three pharmacies, two milliners, two liveries, two barbers and two newspapers. School District Number One, opened in 1879, was the first school in Graham County. Then the railroads. The town voted to sell sixteen thousand dollars in bonds to bring a line in, and courted three companies. Not one of them came. The Nicodemus Cyclone reported in September 1888 that several of the town's businessmen were making preparations to move to the proposed new town. Hill City — the white town the same two men had platted in the same county — got its line and went on growing. The post office closed in 1953. The school closed around 1960. The 2020 census counted fourteen people. The town is a National Historic Landmark and, since the twelfth of November 1996, a National Historic Site: five buildings, the two churches, the school, the township hall and the old St. Francis Hotel. Seventeen descendants own farmland out there and five of them still farm it. And every year on the last weekend in July, several hundred descendants come back for Homecoming, which the town has held without a break since 1878. That is the part worth saying plainly. The town is nearly empty and the family has never stopped coming home. If you are a descendant, or your family passed through Nicodemus, add what you know below. Compiled by MyHistoryStone from published reference sources, August 2026. Corrections welcome.