DeWitty

Nebraska’s largest colony of Black homesteaders, out in the Sandhills

The Kinkaid Act of 1904 expanded the Homestead Act to allow 640-acre claims in Nebraska's Sandhills, large parcels of dry, poor land with little vegetation. Clem Deaver, working in the railroad town of Seneca, went to the land office at Valentine and became the first African American to file a Kinkaid claim in Cherry County. He learned there that 50,000 unclaimed acres lay northwest of Brownlee, bordering the North Loup River for almost 15 miles, and he went back to Seneca to promote it.

Settlers filed 11 claims in 1907, and by 1911 there had been 43 entries, many on both banks of the river. Sod houses went up across the hills. Black Canadian farmers who had settled near Overton in Dawson County came to join them. By 1929 the colony had claimed 56 homesteads covering 29,402 acres. Between 150 and 175 Black residents lived there at one time or another, with a peak of about 150 in 1915, and the National Park Service counts it the most populous, long-lived and successful Black homesteader settlement in Nebraska.

The town took its name from Miles H. DeWitty, who ran the post office and a small store. When the postmaster changed in 1916, the name changed with it, to Audacious.

Social life centred on the St. James African Methodist Episcopal Church, built in 1910. Parents set up school districts where no white settlers lived, with most teachers drawn from DeWitty itself, and one school took Black and white children together. Books came by mail from the State Library in Lincoln. In the early 1920s an all-Black baseball team, the Sluggers, put together several undefeated seasons. On the first Sunday in August the colony held a big picnic with speeches, food, games and sometimes a rodeo, and the people of Brownlee were invited.

The land was hard. Few settlers got claims with water rights or grazing meadows, so most bought hay and leased access to water, and some men worked as freighters or ranch hands while women took in washing, cooked or served as midwives. The wet years and high wartime prices of the 1910s carried them. From 1921 drier weather returned and crop prices collapsed, followed by the stock market crash and the long drought of the 1930s. Families mortgaged their land and many lost it to bankers. By 1936 the settlers had sold to ranchers and moved away, and the last original parcel passed to outside hands in the 1990s.

On 11 April 2016 the Nebraska State Historical Society dedicated a roadside marker on U.S. Highway 83. About 200 people came, including 18 descendants from six states.