Alice Ballard Homestead Site

This comb fragment likely dates to after 1871. The peppersauce bottle fragment is likely from 1890s-early 1900s, based on its shape and ribbing. Both plausibly belonged to Alice Ballard. The photo is thought to be the Ballard Family Homestead.

NPS Collections/Santa Monica Mountains. Ballard Homestead image courtesy the Russell and Huse Families

Article written by Nicole Martin, PhD

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You would never know a homestead once stood in a remote spot of Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, now overgrown with vegetation. But starting around 1888, Alice Ballard, an unmarried African American homesteader, built and lived in a one room log house. It was not until the 2018 Woolsey fire burned the area that NPS employees who had been searching for her homestead site found what they believe to be the location.¹

When excavating the site, archeologists unearthed a number of objects dating to the period Alice lived there, including the peppersauce bottle and comb fragments pictured above.² Material fragments like these are powerful tangible links to the past. In a place that appears devoid of human influence, they are palpable reminders of those who shaped the land before us. They also provoke questions. How did Alice find herself in the mountains, and what was it like to build a home in such rough terrain, especially as a Black woman in the Far West?

The Black West

Alice was born in Los Angeles in 1869 to formerly enslaved parents, John and Amanda Ballard. Although California had entered the union in 1850 as a free state, slavery and other forms of bondage still existed for over a decade. Racial prohibitions denied the small Black population the right to vote until the Fifteenth Amendment granted African American men the right in 1870. Remarkably, in this hostile climate, the Ballards found success raising their family and contributing to a growing Black community. John owned multiple properties and co-founded the first Black church in Los Angeles.³

In 1871, everything changed. Tragically Amanda died in childbirth, leaving seven children behind. In the midst of a nationwide depression, John lost his property and financial security. In 1880, as Jim Crow attitudes came to the West, he moved the family several days’ journey to the Santa Monica Mountains. Life in the isolated mountains required self reliance and hard labor. As the only African Americans enumerated on the 1880 census for their new township, the Ballards also found themselves without a supportive community.⁴

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

Building a Homestead

By the 1890s, all of John’s surviving children had moved away except for Alice, the youngest. In 1900, both John and Alice applied for a homestead patent on adjoining plots of land.⁵ The Homestead Act of 1862 provided 160 acres of free public domain to any “head of a family” – which included unmarried women – who was willing to improve the land by erecting a house and raising crops for five years in exchange for a deed of title.⁶

As a Black woman, Alice’s homestead patent was especially remarkable. Before 1900, women claimed less than ten percent of homesteads, and of those, only a small percentage were women of color.⁷ In her homestead testimony, Alice states that she had lived on her homestead for about twelve years and made $290 worth of improvements. In the 1900 census, she was listed as a nurse, which may explain how she paid the high upfront costs, although there is little evidence that she practiced as a nurse. As part of the improvements, she cleared ten to fifteen acres to cultivate fruit trees and vines. Clearing and maintaining the land would have involved difficult, heavy labor.⁸

The Chumash bedrock mortars pictured here are found alongside the same creek that Alice Ballard built her homestead, linking women’s labor in the Santa Monica Mountains across centuries.

NPS Photo/Nicole Kulaga

When living in the mountains, Alice likely came upon bedrock mortars one tenth of a mile downstream from her homestead site. For thousands of years Chumash women in the area crushed and processed seeds on the bedrock with pestles, forming the mortars over time. It is not hard to imagine these Chumash women only a hundred years earlier sitting where Alice might have, milling and working together, perhaps laughing and singing. Alice did not have the same community of women, but she shared with these women the hard work of sustaining life in the Santa Monica mountains. In what was often an unforgiving landscape, they used the same resources to shape the environment around them into a home.⁹

Ballard Mountain

As the only Black residents, Alice’s life in the Santa Monica Mountains was precarious. Recollections from neighbors and newspaper accounts reveal that settlers mistreated the Ballards and even set fire to John’s cabin in 1891.¹⁰ Only a year after receiving her patent, Alice married and soon left for the city, selling her homestead for a mere ten dollars. Whether she left because of the racial animus directed at her family or because a large wildfire may have burned down her home in 1903 is unknown. She died in Los Angeles County in 1937.¹¹

Ballard Mountain, Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area

NPS Photo

While the Ballard presence in the mountains slowly faded from sight, retaken by vegetation, the memory of their presence lived on but in a severely degraded form. The highest peak near where both homesteads once stood was known by a racial slur for decades, even printed on government maps. It was not until the local community and descendants revitalized the family’s history that it was renamed in 2010 to Ballard Mountain.¹² Now, with the discovery of Alice’s homestead site and the hidden fragments it contains, a fuller picture of this resilient woman is materializing for future generations.

Home and Homelands Exhibition

This project was made possible through the National Park Service in part by a grant from the National Park Foundation.

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¹ Cy Shafii, “CSUN Alum Uncovers Early Homestead Owned by African American Woman in Santa Monica Mountains,” CSUN Today, December 4, 2019.

² Both fragments were found during a NPS excavation of the site – in coordination with California State University, Northridge – held in summer of 2021.

³ Patty R. Colman, “John Ballard and the African American Community in Los Angeles, 1850-1905,” Southern California Quarterly 94, no. 2 (2012): 196-200, 204-05, 208-10. For more on unfree labor in nineteenth-century California, see Stacey Smith, Freedom’s Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), and Kevin Waite, West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021).

⁴ Colman, “John Ballard and the African American Community,” 218-221.

⁵ Ibid., 223-25.

⁶ “Homestead Act (1862),” Milestone Documents, National Archives.

⁷ Greg Bradsher, “Women Homesteaders,” The Text Message, National Archives.

⁸ Alice Ballard Homestead Testimony, 1900, reprinted in Colman, “John Ballard and the African American Community,” 226-27. Information about the unlikely possibility of Alice being a nurse comes from Patty Colman, email to the author, April 23, 2024.

⁹ Information on the Chumash bedrock mortars is from Nicole Kulaga, Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, email to the author, October 25, 2023.

¹⁰ Colman, “John Ballard and the African American Community,” 223.

¹¹ Shafii, “CSUN Alum Uncovers Early Homestead.” It is unknown if the grandsons were Alice’s children or her siblings’.

¹² “To Right a Wrong: Ballard Mountain,” Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, National Park Service, 2022.