In 1908, he and his co-founders bought a stretch of farmland in the Central Valley and got to work. Many of the town’s streets were named after prominent Black leaders or abolitionists, and its founders dreamed of building the West’s first Black university.
“They had a glee club, they had a debate society,” said Kadara. “They were a thriving, upscale community.”
And they had water from the nearby White River. But a few years after Allensworth was established, powerful white farmers diverted the stream to irrigate their crops and cut off the town’s supply.
Fortunately, Allensworth had a backup plan: groundwater. The town planned to tap into the ancient aquifers that run deep underground in the Central Valley. A local company that had sold them land promised to help dig the wells and build the town’s water system, according to several historians.
But the firm, Pacific Farming Co., violated its contract and drilled fewer than half of the wells.
“Allensworth was promised fertile land and water — which [was] reneged on,” said Hunter.
The town sued Pacific Farming, but reached a settlement that left the town in debt. Meanwhile, the company honored its contract with Alpaugh, a majority-white community a few miles away, and dug all the wells they had agreed to.
These battles over water access were prevalent throughout California in the early 20th century. As the Central Valley became an agricultural powerhouse, Black migrants flocked to it for a piece of the California dream, along with immigrants from Mexico, Japan, India and the Philippines. But more established local farmers, almost all of whom were white, sought to control as much of the state’s water as possible.
The result, says Jonathan London, an associate professor at the UC Davis Department of Human Ecology, was a “separate but unequal system of water provisions.” When corporate interests resorted to illegal behavior, communities of color took them to court, but rarely got a fair hearing.
“It was a really difficult situation — getting squeezed by the corporations on one hand, in a way that really was racially biased, and then having a judicial system that was also racially biased,” said London. “They had really nowhere to turn.”
Without a secure water supply, Allensworth’s farmers couldn’t get enough water for their crops. And they faced other racist roadblocks. Local companies charged Black farmers nearly four times as much for land as white farmers, then tried to prevent them from buying land altogether. The railroad shut down Allensworth’s station and moved it to the majority-white Alpaugh. Then, in 1914, Lt. Col. Allen Allensworth was struck and killed by a motorcycle. The driver was white, and no charges were ever brought against him.
By the 1920s, Allensworth’s Black residents started to move away.
‘If it’s not drinkable, you may as well be without’
Today, the most visible evidence of Lt. Col. Allensworth’s utopian project is an obscure California state park. Tourists can walk through the town’s original buildings, visit the old church, and tour the lieutenant colonel’s home. Contemporary Allensworth sits across the street. It’s quiet and welcoming, populated by mostly Latinx farmworkers who moved in as Black residents departed. The town is hemmed in by irrigated vineyards and orchards. Many Central Valley farmers get water deliveries from the State Water Project and the Central Valley Project, feats of 20th-century engineering that shuttle water from Northern California to cities and farms in the south. But like most small valley towns, Allensworth doesn’t have access to this water source.
Instead, it’s still tapping its shrinking aquifer, which, according to residents, tastes unusually good. There’s “an itty-bitty sweetness to it,” said Hunter. But like most people in town, she only uses the water to shower, wash dishes or flush toilets. She hasn’t had a drink from it in years.
“Come to find out the water was contaminated with arsenic,” she said.
