Black Farmers Try for Kansas Mill

It was 1886 when the Western Cyclone, a weekly newspaper once published in this black settlement, first printed the ad. "Looking for a good flour mill," it said. By that time, the number of former slaves farming this Kansas prairie had swelled to nearly 700. From one end of the township to the other, black farmers could be seen toiling their few acres.

Among them was Alonzo Gillan Alexander, who farmed 600 acres of wheat with mules. More than 115 years later, Alexander's descendants have rallied the last remaining black farmers and residents to build that long sought-after flour mill. And, in the process, they hope to save the family farm and revive the dying black town.

In the late 1870s and early 1880s, several thousand blacks flocked to Kansas, earning them the nickname of "Exodusters." From the exodus of former slaves, more than a half-dozen black settlements sprung up in Kansas. Of those communities, only Nicodemus survived. The northwest Kansas town is now a protected National Historic Park site.

Alexander's grandson — A. Gillan Alexander III, or Gil as he is better known around Nicodemus — farms 650 acres of wheat. Alexander, his sister, Sharyn Dowdell, and three other farmers founded the Nicodemus Flour Co-op in 2000.

Last July, they took their hard white wheat crop to a neighboring mill and produced 250 3-pound containers of flour under the name "Promised Land Flour."

It quickly sold out.

The dream of the town's own flour mill soon grew. Low grain prices raised hope that the entrepreneurs could make money by milling their own hard white wheat flour and marketing it under the name of the historic town.

"We want the standard set for this flour ... so people can know not only our milling flour but that we are maintaining the land that maintains us — because, believe it or not, it is the only land we've got," Gil Alexander said.

The first black settlers came here from Kentucky to flee racial oppression after the Civil War, founding the all-black colony in 1877. Soon others followed from Michigan, Louisiana and Mississippi.

Kansas — long associated with the Underground Railroad and abolitionist John Brown — was billed as the Promised Land for "all colored people" by land developers eager to populate the barren prairie.

Within a decade, settlers here boasted four general stores, a grocery, three land companies, two druggists, a lawyer, two hotels, two livery stables, a blacksmith shop, a harness and boot repair store and an ice cream parlor. The town even had a baseball team, a literary society and a band.

But more than a century later, little remains. The town began to decline after failing to attract a railroad. Businesses shut down, and the population shrank to as few as 23 people and two dogs. No children live here.

Only four black farmers still work the land once homesteaded by their ancestors, though several black landowners lease land for others to farm. Most either lost their farmland to mortgage foreclosures or sold out to bigger farmers.

Gil Alexander's cousin, Angela Bates-Tompkins, is the town's historian. She said she hopes the town's designation as a national park, and the flour's roots in Nicodemus history, will give the product an edge.

"It is in our blood to make it successful," she said.

It was Bates-Tompkins, in researching the town's history to get the federal historical designation, who found that opening a flour mill was one of the town's objectives when it was originally built.

That discovery made a big impression on Edgar Hicks, a grain marketing consultant in Omaha, Neb.

"We feel it is kind of a mandate to develop this flour mill," he said.

A native Louisianan with no family ties to Nicodemus, Hicks was nonetheless drawn to the town. His grain industry expertise got the town an $83,965 federal grant last year to develop a historical community-based wheat milling cooperative.

Preliminary estimates put the cost of a mill and wheat cleaning facility at $2.5 million, and the group is looking to purchase a nearby abandoned school for the facility initially, since Nicodemus has no buildings that could house it.

Farmers in general are facing challenges with low wheat prices, and selling a value-added product like flour — instead of just a bulk commodity — could help, Hicks said.

The objective, he said, is to save Nicodemus.

"If something happens to these farmers, there wouldn't be anything left of Nicodemus but a historical park site," Hicks said.

An Associated Press Story June 7, 2002

More about Nicodemus, Kansas and the Nicodemus National Historic Site