Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park

 park, place with historical importance, township

When the California Colony and Home Promoting Association filed the Allensworth Township site plan the Tulare County Recorder on 3 August 1908, it represented both the culmination of years of prior planning and organization and the start of what was to become the present town of Allensworth.
Their 900-acre community was named after the man whose dream it was to build a black self-governed and self-sufficient colony. It would be a place, he hoped, where African Americans would "settle upon the bare desert and cause it to blossom as a rose."
With Lieutenant Colonel Allen Allensworth as president of the Association, plans were developed to establish an all-Black community here in the southwest corner of Tulare County. The community became a reality with the filing of the township site plan. In an article in the 7 August 1908 issue of the Tulare Register, it was noted, “The Town, which is to be called Allensworth, is to enable colored people to live on an equity with whites and to encourage industry and thrift in the race,” It also declared that “Allensworth is the only enterprise of its kind in the United States.”
The hamlet boasted a hotel, a school, a library, a church, a general store -- the basic municipal amenities that its settlers had found wanting.
As a youth, Allensworth was sold in the slave markets three times (once for daring to learn how to read.)
In a remarkable career, he fought on Navy gunboats in the American Civil War and in later years served as an Army chaplain in the Philippines, attaining the highest military rank any black man had held. He also became a Baptist minister before founding the town that bears his name.
The thriving community had reached population of about 400 in 1914, when Col. Allensworth was struck and killed by a motorcyclist in Monrovia, California.
In the following years, beset by water problems and hurt by the closure of its railroad depot, the town began to wither.

www.parks.ca.gov/default.asp?page_id=583