Alice Ballard: A Black Woman Homesteader in the Santa Monica Mountains

In a remote, overgrown corner of Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, nothing shows that a homestead once stood. But from around 1888, Alice Ballard, an unmarried African American woman, built and lived in a one-room log house there. Only after the 2018 Woolsey Fire burned the area did Park Service staff who had been searching for it find what they believe is the site. Excavations in summer 2021, with California State University, Northridge, turned up objects from her time, including fragments of a pepper-sauce bottle and combs — small, tangible links to a life lived in rough country.

The Black West

Alice was born in Los Angeles in 1869 to formerly enslaved parents, John and Amanda Ballard. California had joined the Union as a free state in 1850, yet slavery and other bondage lingered for more than a decade, and Black Californians could not vote until the Fifteenth Amendment gave Black men the vote in 1870. Even so, the Ballards prospered: John owned several properties and co-founded the first Black church in Los Angeles.

Then, in 1871, Amanda died in childbirth, leaving seven children, and in a nationwide depression John lost his property. In 1880, as Jim Crow attitudes reached the West, he moved the family several days' journey into the Santa Monica Mountains, where life demanded self-reliance and hard labor — and where, as the only African Americans recorded in their township's 1880 census, they had no supporting community.

Her own homestead

By the 1890s all of John's surviving children had left except Alice, the youngest. In 1900, father and daughter both applied for homestead patents on neighboring plots. The Homestead Act of 1862 gave 160 acres of public land to any "head of a family" — unmarried women included — who built a house and farmed it for five years.

Alice Ballard's 1901 homestead patent, granting her 160 acres west of the San Bernardino meridian. U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management, General Land Office Records

Her patent was remarkable: before 1900, women made fewer than 10 percent of homestead claims, and only a small share of them were women of color. In her testimony she said she had lived there about twelve years and made $290 in improvements, clearing ten to fifteen acres for fruit trees and vines — heavy, hard work. The 1900 census listed her as a nurse, which might explain how she met the upfront costs, though there is little sign she worked as one.

A tenth of a mile downstream lay bedrock mortars, worn over thousands of years by Chumash women grinding seeds. Alice lacked their community of women, but shared with them the labor of making a home in this demanding landscape from the same resources.

Chumash bedrock mortars along the creek where Alice Ballard built her homestead. NPS photo / Nicole Kulaga

Ballard Mountain

Life as the only Black residents was precarious. Neighbors' recollections and newspapers show that settlers mistreated the Ballards, and in 1891 someone set fire to John's cabin. A year after her patent, Alice married and soon moved to the city, selling her homestead for ten dollars — whether because of racial hostility, or because a big wildfire in 1903 may have burned her home, is unknown. She died in Los Angeles County in 1937.

Ballard Mountain, Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. NPS photo

For decades the highest peak near the two homesteads was known by a racial slur, printed even on government maps. After local residents and descendants revived the family's story, it was renamed Ballard Mountain in 2010. With her homestead site found, a fuller picture of Alice Ballard is emerging.

Sources

Based on "Alice Ballard Homestead Site," by Nicole Martin, part of the Home and Homelands exhibition, National Park Service, drawing on work by Patty R. Colman, the National Archives and Santa Monica Mountains staff; a work of the United States government in the public domain, rewritten in hubnx's own words.