Nicodemus National Historic Site

In April 1877 seven men, six of them Black, formed the Nicodemus Town Company, with the Reverend W. H. Smith as president and W. R. Hill, a white land speculator, as treasurer. Their broadside of July 2, 1877, addressed "To the Colored Citizens of the United States," borrowed from "Wake Nicodemus," Henry Clay Work's 1864 song about an enslaved African who asked to be woken for the day of jubilee, and rewrote its chorus to call settlers "to meet us under the cottonwood tree, in the Great Solomon Valley." The first group, about 350 people from the Lexington area of Kentucky, arrived on September 17, 1877. The promised timber was not there, and the town was a cluster of earthen dugouts. More came from Kentucky and Mississippi in 1878 and 1879.

By the mid-1880s Nicodemus had stone buildings, stores, hotels, a bank and two newspapers, and thirty new buildings went up in 1886 alone. Then the Missouri Pacific passed it by in 1887 and the Union Pacific in 1888, choosing Bogue instead, and many residents moved there, some taking their buildings with them. The town stayed a center for the Black farming families of the township, and its Emancipation celebration, held every year since 1878, is now the Homecoming in late July.

Five buildings make up the historic site: the Township Hall, which is the visitor center, the A.M.E. Church, the Old First Baptist Church, the St. Francis Hotel and School District No. 1. Congress made it a National Historic Site in 1996.