Crime Scene and Trauma Cleanup in Nicodemus, KS

Nicodemus is an unincorporated community and census-designated place in Graham County, Kansas, and it is the only remaining western town established by African Americans during the Reconstruction period following the Civil War.

Nicodemus was founded in 1877 and is named for the Biblical figure Nicodemus, though another tradition holds the name was inspired by the legendary account of an African prince taken into slavery who later purchased his freedom.

On April 18, 1877, a group of seven Kansans — six of them Black — established the Nicodemus Town Company, with African American minister W. H. Smith as president and white land speculator W. R. Hill as treasurer, aiming to establish the first all-Black settlement on the Great Plains.

Most of the founders were former slaves from Kentucky, and promotion across the South brought about 350 settlers from Lexington, Kentucky, in September 1877, with another group of about 250 arriving in the spring of 1878, to a 160-acre townsite on the northern bank of the Solomon River.

Early settlers faced severe hardship on the treeless prairie — lacking timber, many built homes out of prairie sod, farmed with hand tools, sold buffalo bones, and traveled miles away to work for the railroads to earn money.

By 1879–1880 Nicodemus was growing into a real town with a hotel, two stores, a school, and three churches, and its population reached about 600 people as early as 1878.

Nicodemus declined after it failed to attract a railroad — despite voting to sell $16,000 in bonds, none of the three prospective railroads (the Missouri Pacific, Union Pacific, and Santa Fe) brought tracks to the town, and most businesses eventually relocated elsewhere.

The Great Depression and the Dust Bowl drove Nicodemus's population as low as about 40 people, and its post office closed in 1953 and its school around 1960.

Nicodemus was named a National Historic Landmark in 1976, and Congress established the Nicodemus National Historic Site as a unit of the National Park Service on November 12, 1996.

The National Historic Site preserves five historic buildings representing the community's pillars: the Township Hall (built in 1939 with Works Progress Administration support from locally quarried limestone and now the visitor center), the St. Francis Hotel, the First Baptist Church, the African Methodist Episcopal Church — restored and reopened to visitors in 2021 — and the District Number 1 School.