A Legacy of Freedom Is Teetering With Age

New York Times ^ | July 3, 2005 | MICHAEL WILSON

[nickcarraway]

Willina Hickman was 30 when she arrived here in 1878, and she found it difficult to contain her horror at what she saw. Years later she recalled: "I looked with all the eyes I had. 'Where is Nicodemus? I don't see it.' "

Nicodemus, Kan., was founded by freed slaves and is populated by their descendants. Ora Switzer, 102, is its oldest resident. "The families lived in dugouts," she said. "The scenery was not at all inviting, and I began to cry."

Nicodemus was home to some 600 black settlers, mostly former slaves from Kentucky. It was among the first towns planned by blacks, drawn here by wildly exaggerated handbills telling "all colored people that want to go to Kansas" of "the finest country we ever saw," "pleasing to the human eye" with nine months of summer. Instead, settlers like Willina Hickman found new extremes of heat and cold, and a constant wind blowing dust across a forbidding landscape.

And yet, compared with today, Nicodemus was booming then. Now the number of residents stands at 22. The dugouts are long gone, but some of the homes look so old, it is easy to mistake them as one of the five designated historical buildings in town. One of those buildings, the First Baptist Church, long ago shut its doors, deemed unsafe because of the sway of its thick walls and the missing planks in the wooden floor.

The average age of the residents of Nicodemus is 71, said Phyllis Howard, a park ranger who works full time in the town's visitor center for the trickle of tourists who turn off U.S.

The unofficial mayor of Nicodemus, who carries a deputy sheriff's badge wrapped in a handkerchief in his back pocket, is Fred Switzer.

[martin_fierro]

Now the number of residents stands at 22.

And the number of Democrat voters stands at 400.