"Ring, Ring, Ring" Just like every morning the wake up call screamed for us to get up. This particular morning it was at 6:00 A.M. Today we were leaving Denver and heading to Nicodemus, Kansas before our departure to Ames saturday morning.
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| Ranger Phyllis Howard leading the tour |
Nicodemus is one of the oldes continuously occupied African American towns in the west. We took a tour of this small, unique town and learned all the information from Phyllis (the Nicodemus park ranger). We were also fortunate enough to meet Reverend Brown who invited us into his church and graciously answered our questions. We learned about the struggles of the first settlers who came to Kansas in search of self sufficiency and hope of a better life. The first residents lived in holes in the ground called dugouts and then progressed to sod homes before they could obtain the resources to for stick built homes and businesses.
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| Reverend Brown at the new Baptist Church |
After we filled our brains with all the information possible we began our assignment for the day. We were to walk Nicodemus and document what we saw through photographs, videos and drawings of the town. There were a total of five historically protected buildings in the small town. When our work was done, we all had fun playing basketball on their local court. Much of what we discovered was the remnants of former homes and buildings when the town was thriving. In the 1980's, the population of Nicodemus was around 700, today there are only 20 people living in Nicodemus, but they are all decedents of the original black settlers who came here to live a life free from slavery.
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| Historic Church on the left, new church on the right Remnants of former homestead in the foreground |
We then loaded the vans with all our stuff and headed to Hays for our last night of Savanna Studio Fall 2011. So after we unloaded the vans we all headed to IHOP to eat dinner. That night we all sat around in the hot tub and talked about what we were going to do once back in Ames the following night.
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| IHOP! |
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