Wake Nicodemus: Excavating a Black Homestead Family's Farm in Kansas

The townspeople of Nicodemus. Historic American Buildings Survey Collection, Library of Congress

In 1877, African American settlers escaping the new forms of oppression rising in the post-Reconstruction South founded Nicodemus on the windswept plains of Kansas. It became, and stayed, a community mostly of Black farm families. Nicodemus National Historic Site now preserves five of its buildings: the First Baptist Church, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the St. Francis Hotel, the First District School and Nicodemus Township Hall.

Students led by Dr. Margaret Wood of Washburn University excavated one of the settlement-era farms — the Thomas Johnson/Henry Williams farm, site 14GH102, about four kilometers north of town — to find and explore the traces of the town's first years.

The promise and the plains

In the summer of 1877, the Reverend M. M. Bell and his congregation, at a small African American Baptist church near Lexington, Kentucky, listened warily to a white speaker, W. R. Hill. The "Great Solomon Valley of Kansas," he told them, "offered the opportunity of a lifetime if they were brave enough to seize it." He promised rich soil, plenty of water, building stone, timber for fuel, a mild climate, wild horses ready to be broken to the plow — and government land for homesteading, in a state known for its liberal stance on the rights of Black people.

Even so, 350 people from around Lexington paid a five-dollar fee to join the September migration, most without enough money to see them through the winter. They came by train, by wagon and sometimes on foot, driven by the hope of a future for their children, and arrived on September 17, 1877. The bare plains were nothing like the wooded hills of Kentucky: fifty of the most disheartened went back to eastern Kansas the next day.

The historic area of Nicodemus. Historic American Buildings Survey Collection, Library of Congress

The Johnson and Williams family

Thomas Johnson — farmer, Civil War veteran and Baptist deacon — was among the earliest settlers. He homesteaded land just outside town in 1878, filed his claim in 1885 and received the patent in April 1889. On arrival he organized a congregation and held revival services in his dugout, and Spring Creek, which ran past it, made an ideal place for baptisms.

He brought a large family: his wife Zerina; his son Henry, daughter-in-law Mary and granddaughter Ella; his daughter Ella (perhaps also known as Ellen); his daughter Emma Williams, son-in-law Charles Williams and an adopted grandchild, Mack Switzer; his widowed sister-in-law Mary Johnson; his nephew Joseph; and great-nieces Liz and Clarina Johnson. In 1880 the Johnson/Williams families numbered 13. The census lists them as five households, but township maps show only one dugout on their land, so whether they lived together is unclear. Johnson's own land formed an L-shaped block in Section 23 of the township, bordered by the claims of his children and son-in-law.

Farming as one unit

The 1885 Kansas state census shows Thomas, Henry and Joseph Johnson and Charles Williams each working 160 acres, valued at $2,700. Together the family had $85 of machinery, 4 milk cows, 9 head of cattle, 2 pigs and 1 horse. Like their neighbors they grew mostly corn and wheat, with some sorghum and hay for feed; each farm had half an acre of potatoes, and the women of the family made 600 pounds of butter.

Each household seems to have specialized: Henry Johnson planted more than 37 acres of corn and wheat, Joseph Johnson owned a barn, and another member of the family had invested in expensive machinery. In 1886, A. G. Tallman of the Western Cyclone newspaper saw a family pooling its labor and equipment:

A visit to the farm of Thos. Johnson is enough to encourage the homesick farmer of any state. He and his children, all with families, own a tract of land of a thousand acres about one fourth of which is under cultivation. He has about 60 fine hogs and the whole family owns a large herd of cattle and several fine horses. They have recently bought a twine binder and are in the midst of harvest. When you make a visit to Mr. J's farm do not forget to look at Mrs. Johnson's chickens and ducks.

Losing the land, and winning it back

The late-1880s droughts hit the family hard, and in 1887 a grass fire took Joseph Johnson's barn, his feed and many of his animals. In 1889, Thomas Johnson and most of the family sold their claims. Only Charles and Emma Williams's family stayed. By 1900 Emma was a widow raising four children, and her sons Henry and Neil worked the land.

Thomas Johnson's claim passed through several hands to the Midway Land Company of Wyandot County, Kansas, which held it until 1906, when Henry Williams — his grandson — bought it. Henry and his wife Cora raised six children there, next to his mother's land, and lived on it until the middle of the twentieth century. It still belongs to a close family member.

What the ground held

An excavation team at the site. Midwest Archeological Center, NPS

A dugout was dug with hand tools into a hillside or stream bank and roofed with poles, brush and enough earth to keep out the rain. A fireplace cut into the earth wall gave heat and a place to cook; the front wall was scrap lumber, stone or sod, with a window if glass could be had. Floors and walls were packed earth, sometimes plastered with water mixed with a yellow mineral found locally. Dugouts were meant to be temporary, and sod and frame houses replaced them.

A 2006 survey noticed several depressions on the farm. The field school dug 11 shovel test pits and 19 one-meter test units and identified 2 structures and 17 related features.

A half-buried sod house

Just above the floor lay a layer of fine, ashy soil from the house's last years, holding more than 495 artifacts — 44% of everything found:

• building: 98 wire nails, 4 cut nails, 16 pieces of window glass, a knob and a rivet
• clothing and personal: 2 beads, 5 safety pins, a collar stud, 23 buttons, 2 snaps, a piece of a shell hair comb
• kitchen and table: 3 canning-jar fragments, a spoon, pieces of a mixing bowl, a platter, a teapot, teacups and a saucer, all plain whiteware, ironstone or porcelain
• play and leisure: a marble, doll parts, two white clay tobacco pipes, a piece of whiskey bottle
• dating evidence: four coins — three pennies and a dime — from 1890, 1900 and 1904, and two pieces of a black comb of either Bakelite (made from 1907) or finer plastic (from 1915)

The house was probably lived in until about 1915 and abandoned when a frame farmhouse was built nearby around 1919. Its last occupants were most likely Henry Williams, his wife and their six children. When it was built is less clear. Red transfer-print whiteware (about 1829–1859) deep in the test units outside the north wall points either to an early date or to a family using old dishes — and the historical record strongly suggests Thomas Johnson built it around 1877. The agricultural census says he had a spring he used for household and farm; 50 m from the ruins stand the remains of a pitcher pump over a natural spring, something relatively rare in the area.

The home Henry Williams built on his grandfather's farm. Historic American Buildings Survey Collection, Library of Congress

The root cellar

The most obvious feature on the site is a C-shaped depression cut into the slope, 7.7 m by 6.1 m including the earth probably heaped outside for insulation and support, with a doorway about 2 m wide on the south side between two mounds. The center lies about 1 m below the ground around it, and the packed-dirt floor about 1.4 m below the surface. The walls were bare soil, the roof probably a simple wood frame, perhaps covered with sod.

• Of the food-related material excavated, 78% was home canning-jar glass.
• Peach pits lay in clusters across the floor, with rough iron door hinges, a few bottle fragments, and bones of small animals such as mice and weasels.
• Level groups of irregular stains running into the walls mark shelves and bins, built from the scarce wood of trees along Spring Creek.

What they ate — and what they sold

Almost everything was local: limestone and sod for the house, branches for shelves, bins, floor supports and roofs, even ground local limestone for the floor. The animal bones tell the same story of self-reliance, with some surprises.

On a farm in cattle country, the archeologists expected far more livestock bone. What they found were bones of young pigs, and a single, heavily worn cow tooth — perhaps from old dairy cows killed once they stopped giving milk. Most of the large-mammal bone was jaw and skull, which suggests the family ate the cuts with less meat and sold the rest.

Visitors remembered fishing in Spring Creek, but excavators found no fish bones or scales — perhaps because of the small sample or the recovery methods. They did find a crayfish part, and the frog bones: 96% of them from the root cellar's floor and occupation levels, and only four elements of the lower skeleton — the ilium, femur, tibiofibula and urostyle. Butchery marks, with femurs consistently cut across the acetabulum, say the family was preparing frogs' legs, and their abundance in the root cellar suggests they may have been canned.

The family grew crops and raised livestock for sale, but there is little sign they ate much of it themselves. Other Kansas homesteads in risky, marginal country show the same pattern: rely on the land around you, sell your produce outside the community.

That is not simply poverty. Tea wares, decorative vases and candy dishes, fancy buttons and children's toys all suggest a household with a sense of style and some money to spare.

Family and land

Like the Johnsons, the first settlers were a handful of large extended families, most of whom had been enslaved on a single plantation in Georgetown; their names are still found in the area. Families filed several claims, each in the name of a different head of household, to hold as much connected land as they could. The Johnsons and Williamses claimed a whole section and parts of two neighboring sections, splitting tasks, equipment and resources to spread the risk. It was not enough against the western Kansas climate — but families worked for years to win back what they lost, as Lula Craig recalled, and the Williamses did.

The farm shows what these families sacrificed and invented to be independent: economic independence won through ingenuity and local materials, and a kinship written into the way the land was settled and handed down. As the people of Nicodemus understood, it was the land and their ties to one another that gave them their freedom.

Sources

Based on "'Wake Nicodemus:' Archeology at the Thomas Johnson/Henry Williams Farm," by Dr. Margaret Wood, Washburn University, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The article draws on Kenneth Hamilton's history in Promised Land on the Solomon (National Park Service, 1986), the 1880 U.S. and 1885 Kansas censuses, A. G. Tallman's 1886 report in the Western Cyclone, the Lula Craig manuscript at the University of Kansas, and faunal analysis by Dr. Tanner (2006). Its two counts of frog bones differ (53 and 54), so only the percentages are given here; Lula Craig's words are paraphrased. Rewritten in hubnx's own words.