INTRODUCTION
Why did Black families leave Canada? Why did they choose Nebraska? Discover possible reasons for the decisions mandated by and how the future Black Nebraska homesteaders made their way from Ontario to Dawson County, Nebraska.
COMMUNITIES
A brief description.
Michigan
A brief description.
Illinois
A brief description.
Nebraska with DeWitty Database
OVERTON, DAWSON COUNTY: The first wave of Black homesteaders from the Elgin Settlement in Canada settled in Overton, located in Dawson County. Seven of the Meehan children were born here, and three of them are buried here, not having reached much beyond their first birthdays.
DEWITTY, CHERRY COUNTY (The Sandhills): DeWitty, later called Audacious, was the epitome of Black community building in Nebraska. Not all DeWitty residents had roots that extended into Canada, but the Canadian contingent was DeWitty’s heart. Too often, when DeWitty is discussed, only a handful of families are mentioned. This database captures the names and brief biographies of sixty-two families who called DeWitty home. The database was developed from several sources, including Bureau of Land Management records.
ALLIANCE, BOX BUTTE COUNTY: As families grew and scattered, many relocated to Alliance in Box Butte County. It is in Alliance that Charles and Hester Meehan took their final rest.
WESTERVILLE, CUSTER COUNTY:
Wyoming
EMPIRE, GOSHEN COUNTY:
South Dakota
OKOBOJO, SULLY COUNTY:
Napa Valley, California
A brief description. Story of the picture of Livas Anderson.
Other Communities
A brief description. This will include Montana, Colorado, Minnesota, etc.
Not the Same Ground
The families in this story moved across territory that gets flattened, in casual usage, into a single vague “out west” or “the Midwest.” It wasn’t one place. Michigan and Illinois sit in one federally defined region; Nebraska, Wyoming, and South Dakota cross into two others that are frequently — and incorrectly — treated as interchangeable: the Great Plains and, within Nebraska alone, the Sandhills. Distinguishing them matters here, because the land shaped how these families settled, farmed, and survived.
The Midwest, as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau, is one of four official U.S. regions (alongside the Northeast, South, and West), comprising twelve states from Ohio to the Dakotas. Michigan and Illinois belong to this region; so, administratively, do Nebraska, Kansas, and the Dakotas — a reminder that “Midwest” is a bureaucratic boundary, not a landscape. Read the Census Bureau’s regional definitions →
The Great Plains is not a Census region at all — it’s a physical and cultural one, the vast, arid grassland interior stretching roughly from Montana and the Dakotas south through Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas, and into Oklahoma and Texas. Early travelers called it the Sea of Grass: a rolling, largely treeless expanse where wind, drought, and distance dictated everything from crop choice to community spacing. This is the country the map traces from Torrington and Empire, Wyoming, down through Okobojo, South Dakota, and across Nebraska.
The Sandhills, by contrast, is a much smaller and far stranger place — and it belongs almost entirely to Nebraska. It is the largest sand dune formation in the Western Hemisphere, a 19,000-square-mile expanse of grass-stabilized dunes formed over thousands of years, sitting atop the Ogallala Aquifer. Its topography — rolling, treeless, held together only by root systems — makes it geologically and agriculturally distinct from the Great Plains that surround it, not just a colorful nickname for “rural Nebraska.” Of every location on this map, only Cherry County — DeWitty — sits inside it.
The map that follows shows these three geographies layered independently, so the difference is visible rather than asserted.