I think that everybody is like a spoke in an wheel.

And if you don't honor the traditions of something, you're you're missing one of those spokes.

I think in order to look to the future, you have to you have to understand where where you have come from.

And although I know there are a lot of people who can't, it gives you a basis for who you are and who you can possibly be in the future.

I think if you have an appreciation for the fact that our ancestors came over here and what they had to do to be successful and to make these small towns run and to be part of a community, if you don't understand where they're coming from and you really don't understand yourself.

After the Civil War from the 1860s, there's a lot of people that came out here and of course there was a lot of land speculation going on.

And so there are people traveling Europe that were going out and trying to get the settlement.

They were backed by the railroads after the railroad came through.

There were a lot of railroad land.

Ever section of land or 640 acres that had an odd number on it.

On 20 miles on each side of the railroad belonged to the railroad.

So the railroad had a lot of land out here that wanted settled because settlement brings in commerce, it brings in industry, it brings in people, it brings in town sites to start those, and it has taxes for the county.

So there's a lot of things going on.

There were Germans, there were Irish, there were English, Volga Germans were Germans that had been moved to Russia.

There were Polish communities, especially in eastern Kansas.

But of course, the African-Americans that came to the Nicodemus area were out of Kentucky and Tennessee regions.

Nicodemus was established in 1877 by former enslaved people that came out of Georgetown in Lexington, Kentucky, Scott County, Fayette County and the surrounding areas.

They were solicited to come and settle in this town by members of what was called the Nicodemus Town Company.

This was a town speculator by the name of W. R. Hill and a Reverend Roundtree.

They went to central Kentucky to solicit people to come and populate the town.

The push for the people leaving was really Jim Crow.

But the lure of the land and homesteading and being a part of an all black settlement was a draw.

For the folks that decided to actually make the move it was really a decision that was based on the potential of experiencing freedom in a new way and becoming land owners.

So this was their way of participating in settling the West, creating autonomy, autonomy for themselves in an all black community that governed itself and becoming homesteaders, getting that 160 acres from the federal government.

All they had to do was live here for five years and improve it.

It was the lure of the land.

It was being able to participate in being able to feel and experience freedom in a way they could not experience or feel that in the Jim Crow South.

Well, because it is an all African-American town and was promoted as such, there are African-American traditions such as the Emancipation Celebration.

We've been doing that ever since 1878.

It was always August the first, because that was the date of the the slaves to be freed in the West Indies.

And so they selected that date to use as their emancipation date.

And they've been doing it.

We've been doing it ever since.

The town over the years has lost its population.

And even though the town itself has lost the population, the community of Nicodemus, the family of Nicodemus has done nothing but expand.

And every year when we have the emancipation celebration, you see the Descendents coming back.

So it's not unusual to see 500 to 1000 people show up here doing the celebration.

You know, western Kansas, really, Kansas.

The West was being promoted not just in the United States, but in Europe.

And so you have a lot of these European communities popping up because they could come to America and get a land to homestead on and to build towns.

If you were a town speculator, like, W. R. Hill was who was instrumental in getting Nicodemus started, you would file a claim on a 160 acres for Townsite, and then you platted the town and you would do your due diligence to get people that come there.

And a lot of times what they would do is they would create newspapers and they would promote the town as if it was already in existence.

And they would show the plate and they would say, this is the main street and we're looking for a blacksmith shop.

We're looking for a mercantile store, looking for a bank.

And so they were soliciting people to come to their town.

And so you have all of these these towns all over northwest Kansas, really all over Kansas.

But out here you have the Volga Germans.

You've got the Bokavenia Germans, Germans that are like in Ellis.

Four miles south of here in south east of here is the French Canadian town, DeMar.

My name is Kaylon Roberts.

Well, I'm president of the DeMar Community Foundation.

They're Canadian French.

In 1876 was the first time we came down here and they settled in along Zurich and Palco and DeMar and Bough.

Yeah, they continued to speak French for for a long time.

In about 1950, I was about nine years old and my grandmothers were both alive.

My great grandmas and they...

They hardly spoke English at all.

They just started converting to English.

We have a couple people that they grew up here that they got into genealogy.

One of them is Larry Ducere He went and do a genealogy on probably about maybe 60 or 70 families.

And so he sent them to us in brochures and we put them in our foundation.

One one of his own family, the Decere family, took it back to the year 1000 where they were all farmers all the way back.

And he he got his genealogy like that.

Most goes back to the about 1600s is what we got in the foundation, takes a family genealogy pedigree back to that far.

This church this has been the gathering point.

Really you know if you got all the farmers and all the merchants and all, you know, all the skilled people and everybody lives in town and everybody lives on a farm, all going to the same church.

The kids didn't get to meet each other.

They they were going to little separate schools out here, so they didn't get to meet each other till they got to church.

And that's why the church became such a focal point for everybody, because that's when kids and families would meet with each other.

And the church was a was a spiritual point, too, for these people.

That was one of their main things that they wanted in their life.

They wanted they wanted a religion in their life because it was good for the morality of their kids and all of that.

And for the community and this building, this church has been... We got it on a national registry now.

I don't know much about how you could get the architecture this nice or from that point in time but apparently they had some pretty skilled people and pretty knowledgeable people to do that.

It's kept the town together because we've had to support this church.

This keeps people coming here and keeps our focus on on the town that way.

You know.

My name is Mary Kohn and I'm a professor of linguistics here at Kansas State University.

For me, Kansas is a fascinating place to be a linguist because there are long histories of language development and change in this region associated with the movements of populations.

One of the things I think people sometimes find surprising when they look at how many different languages were being spoken here in Kansas at that time.

We were getting a lot of immigration from Germany, but also from Sweden, from France, from various locations throughout Europe.

But we also have a huge connection with Spanish as another language.

One of the early ethnic groups in the area was because of the Spanish entrata into the High Plains.

People from Mexico, the Spaniards in Mexico were coming up here and they were writing on what they found, and they were finding miles and miles of grasslands teeming with buffalo and antelope and elk.

And there were a lot of freighters that came up once the Santa Fe trail was established.

So the Santa Fe Trail was a line of commerce that connected Mexico to the US.

And of course, as with all international trade, that brings multilingualism, that brings people who are speaking Spanish, people who are speaking English.

And that held true when the Santa Fe Trail became the Santa Fe Rail line.

Union Pacific Eastern Division may be the first railroad.

That hired.

People from Mexico to help with construction.

And every place that there was a maintenance shop, a round house for the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe developed a Mexican community.

So you can look at Topeka or Chanute or Newton, and there's this Mexican settlement that developed.

What's fascinating to me is that even today, when you look at Hispanic populations in Kansas, it still runs along that Santa Fe trail line, showing the entire depth of that kind of settlement history.

I'm Tim Wenzl, a local author in Dodge City, and I recently wrote a book entitled Dodge City's Mexican Village: A Place in Time.

It existed basically from 1906 to 1956.

The reason for doing the book was actually to document the community, to present the history of this community that existed at the same time Dodge City proper existed.

This was its own community, a Hispanic community, where the only language that was spoken was Spanish.

My name is Frank Sumaya.

I resided at the Mexican village, which is originally known as La Yarda, for the Spanish speaking people, and I lived there for ten years from 46 to 56 until the Mexican village was torn down.

The Mexican village came to be in the early 1900s, largely due to the migration of the Mexicans from Mexico because they were trying to escape the revolution and poverty.

And the railroad was booming at that time and they needed workers to work on the rail yards and the tracks.

And so they would go down and pick these people up at the border and bring them up here.

Now, the railroad needed them year round, so that's why they formed the Mexican village on railroad land so that they could bring their families and stay throughout the year and keep them as employees.

The role of the church was very important to the Mexican people because when they had come from Mexico, that was a high priority for them.

And so when they came here, they continued as part of their culture.

The society was basically just within the village.

And so they were united in their getting together and having fiestas and basically supporting one another.

And we were all poor, but we were happy.

We didn't know the difference between what having money and being poor was.

The culture of the Mexican village was highly sophisticated, largely due because of the number of immigrants that came from Mexico and their tradition along with their culture.

We had our fiestas celebrating all the feast days of the church, and we made it a grand production of all of the fiestas and celebrations.

The Mexican community after the village was done away with we have tried to have reunions with as many people that are still living originally from the Mexican village and their descendants.

We try to explain to the descendants what it meant to live in the Mexican village and what it was like to live there.

Our culture, our tradition and our support for one another.

Even though our numbers are diminishing.

We have tried our best to continue the tradition of sharing our information and our history.

People still came in in groups.

French Canadians, the Volga Germans and others were grouped together not only for religious purposes, but also for the language and the commonality of the culture.

And people were moving here in large communities, setting up churches in their heritage language, setting up newspapers in their heritage language, hiring teachers who taught in their heritage language.

Germany was our second largest immigrant group.

So if you weren't coming in from the US, if you weren't moving to Kansas from somewhere in the US, there were strong chances that you were coming from Germany.

A portion of German descended immigrants to western Kansas did not come from Germany directly, but from the Volga River region of Russia.

My name is Mary Kay Schippers.

All of my ancestors, four generations back and sometimes even further, all came from either Germany or they were Germans from Russia.

The Volga Germans.

My name is Jerry Braun.

I'm a fifth, sixth generation Ellis County native.

My family all came from the Volga area in Russia.

So they were German Russians.

Came over here to the United States.

Yeah to follow the story we have to go all the way back to its very beginning.

And so the seven Years War was going on in Germany, it was in turmoil.

Catherine the Great at the time was now Empress in Russia, but she had German background, she had German heritage.

And so she put out a manifesto to primarily to the Germans because that was her homeland to recruit immigrants to to Russia.

There were a lot of things in it that really looked enticing.

One was no military service, no taxation.

It also said that they could settle anywhere they wanted.

They discovered that, yeah, you can settle anywhere you want as long as you go next to the Volga River, because that was a really, it was like the Wild West.

There were marauders, there were bandits, there was it was a dangerous place.

And that was really where they wanted them to settle and get it, get it, settled down.

So the first few years were really rough for them when they came over into Russia.

But after a few years, things settled down and they started building towns and it was settled.

And had they had successfully lived in that kind of model for 100 years.

Yeah.

And so to have that taken away from them when the reign changed to a new to new Russian leadership, that really made them explore different options and so.

And some looked at South America.

I mean they went and went there.

Yeah, yeah.

So there were other.

It wasn't all to Kansas, you know, other parts of the US, but I think they were still very proud of a lot of their heritage and like the New Year's wish.

Oh, like the New Year's wish.

If we didn't wuensch in German, we didn't get anything.

Yeah.

Still today.

The wuensch... the wuensching tradition among the Volga Germans...

I like to call it Volga German Halloween.

I mean it was like trick or treating at New Years Eve.

That was my third favorite holiday.

It was Christmas, my birthday, and then New Year's Day.

Oh, it was.

It was awesome.

So you would go from house to house and wish the New Year in, and that didn't have to happen on New Year's Day.

You had, you had a week.

Were you could go.

Until epiphany.

Yeah, being Catholic.

So you have that eight days of of Christmas.

So yes, up until January 8th you could wuensch.

You could cash in.

And so you went and so you went from house to house sharing a New Year's wish to your neighbors, to your family, to your friends.

And in my family, that tradition carried on until I was in high school, out of high school.

So we're talking about in the 1990s.

My sister still has her grandchildren, wuensch in German.

It was the perfect opportunity for those little German grandmas to share their amazing pastries and candies and things that they made.

And for the old guys to sit around and just tell their stories, it was it was a great time.

Greatest this time of the year.

And so how does one wuensch in German?

All right, I'll do.

Wir wuenschen euch ein glueckliches Neues Jahr, ein langes Leben, Gesundheit, Friede und Einigkeit, und nach dem Tod, die ewige Glueckseligkeit.

And this is what I said.

I wish you a very happy New Year.

A long life, good health, peace and harmony.

And after death, everlasting happiness.

Many communities carry on traditions of their origin.

Country.

Wilson, dubbed the Czech capital of Kansas, is a prime example.

My name is Melinda Merrell.

I own the Midland Railroad Hotel in Wilson, Kansas.

Wilson became the Czech capital of Kansas, I believe, 1974.

But the reason for that was the Czechs... there was a large group of Czechs that settled here in the 1800s.

When people moved here it was, you know, was a different title.

It was... My family moved from Bohemia, but now it's the Czech Republic and the majority of the Czechs that came here in the late 1800s and early 1900s did not speak English necessarily.

When I used to come here as a child, and I am 68 years old, there was still Czech speaking people here.

And now you see with some of the younger Czechs, they're trying to develop that language again.

You'll see a lot of Czech classes, that type of things.

I think that as the younger people have gotten older, they're realizing that they're losing that heritage and all of a sudden it's kind of coming flooding back.

When the Czechs were here, there was a huge... you see a huge influence of Czech food.

So you'll see like the Kolaches are are a Czech food.

My grandmother used to make Kolaches.

It was a big deal when we would come out to visit.

You see, green bean dumpling soup is a favorite in this area.

So the Czechs definitely made a huge impact.

So the Czech Fest is actually an after harvest Czech Fest.

You'll see a lot of polka bands and then you see a lot of people come in costumes.

They have Czech dancers and they start really young.

I don't know how young, but maybe four or five years old.

We have a collection of Betty Kepka Belton who was known as the egg lady in Wilson, Kansas, and she made Czech eggs her entire life.

I mean, they were just amazing.

And she was also the art teacher at the high school here.

She was teaching her students how to do these eggs.

And interestingly enough, Christine Schletka, who is now the art teacher at the high school, also teaches the tradition of how to do Czech eggs.

And it's probably one of the greatest things we have as far as that and the dancers as far as passing down the tradition from this area of different cultural things.

I think that because of the diverse ethnic groups in the area, when you go from one town to the next, you you see a little bit of that culture.

And then over the years, people interacting with one another began to share different, different things, whether it be recipes or social events, or they would attend each other's events.

And so it makes for a very interesting, diverse cultural environment.

The big mixer was the children going to schools and having to learn English because it was the dominant language.

They would take that home and maybe teach their parents to read the American language.

So it was maintained by some of the people, but yet it was changing by the others because the people were very proud to be Americans after a while.

And you think about the immigration and things they had to go through that made a difference.

Everybody could become landowners.

I think it's important for people to realize that they've come from so many different backgrounds and it's part of the charm of where we are that we have people coming in from so many different kinds of backgrounds to pursue their dreams, to build these communities, to build their schools, to just determine what their newspaper looks like.

I think that that is of real value to remember that people have these connections to different parts of the world, and yet they all came together here in the Great Plains to build something.