Alison has been working with Sherry Hunter, President of the Allensworth Community Services District (ACSD), to research, document, protect and preserve the Allensworth Historic Cemetery, as well as design a community cemetery to its south so that residents may be buried in the same soils as the town’s founders and descendants. The ACSD is a public agency that oversees the allocation of utilities to the unincorporated community and currently owns the cemetery site, but needs funds to ensure its protection and perpetuation. With Ms. Hunter’s tireless efforts, and the dedication of her late mother Nettie Morrison, the cemetery is finally beginning to receive the care it needs. Alison’s work includes assistance in acquiring funding, budgeting, research and writing, and documenting the historic cemetery, as well as designing interpretive elements, and the community cemetery, as a resilient memorial landscape.

ABOUT ALLENSWORTH

Allensworth, today a rural community of approximately 600 people in Tulare County (lower Central Valley), contains both a living town and an adjacent CA State Park. Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park memorializes the original town of Allensworth founded in 1908 by retired Lt. Colonel Allen Allensworth, who escaped slavery and went on to become the highest-ranking African American military man of his time. Allensworth is the first town in California to have been founded, financed, and governed by African Americans. At its height, Allensworth was also a unique social center for Black Californians. Unfortunately, discriminatory practices led to a series of setbacks that reversed progress, including the rerouting of the Santa Fe Railroad rail spur to another community and a broken water company contract with the Pacific Farming Company. Today, the town is designated a “disadvantaged unincorporated community” and struggles to meet basic needs of its Black and Brown residents. Despite its challenges, the Park and town that persist remain a testament to America’s Black culture and the Colonel’s vision for a thriving community.  

ABOUT THE CEMETERY 

The Allensworth Historical Cemetery lies 1.5 miles outside Allensworth State Historic Park bounds, leaving it vulnerable to profound threats such as tractors and ATVs driving over the graves, and cattle grazing and herding through the site. Only a portion of the historic townsite was preserved as a State Historic Park, leaving much of the living town and the historic cemetery outside the state’s protection. Established in 1918 as a five-acre plot, the Cemetery is believed to contain approximately 60 burials dating from 1911 and includes many of Allensworth’s original settlers. In 2020, the Allensworth Community Services District (ACSD) was approved to own and operate the Cemetery but without any resources necessary for its protection. From the 1970s until the mid-1990s, adjacent agricultural operations encroached on cemetery grounds. In addition to direct agricultural cultivation of grains and cotton, disturbances to the site such as plowing and cattle grazing desecrated the site and erased the extents of the burial sites. Since Alison has been working with ACSD, funds were secured for a ground-penetrating radar to trace the extents of the burials and the fence has been installed around the whole parcel including the community cemetery!

Research and design assistants (LJI): Shuyi Zhang, Kavya Gudihal, Sarina Vega, Mark Reid, Jaab Veskijkul