Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park

A slight correction to what I said yesterday about Lake Isabella not even being up to the dam. Doreen and I went for a walk down the road to the dam this morning, and here is a picture of the dam actually holding the little bit of water left in the lake. The park attendant told us, however, that this is the lowest water level in 40 years.

 

They do let a little water trickle down the Kern River, shown in this picture, enough to keep some fish alive. We travelled down the Kern River valley after leaving our campsite this morning. It is a steep, narrow, windy road, but with paved pullouts all along to let the crazy people pass, and there was a lot of traffic, so we were pulling out quite often.

 

Then all of a sudden we pulled out of the mountains to Bakersfield, and beautiful orange groves that go on for miles.

 

We passed through Bakersfield, quite a large spread out community, and headed about an hour north to Colonel Allensworth State Historic Park. There is a campsite at this park with about 25 or 30 sites, but we have it all to ourselves. We parked in a site with our own big Eucalyptus tree (N35 51 59.2, W119 23 33.9).

 

In this park, the buildings of the town of Allensworth have been restored and reconstructed. Colonel Allensworth, a black former army officer and caplain, along with a Professor William Payne, founded this town around 1910 for black people to settle and live free from discrimination, and establish an independent self-sufficient colony. Unfortunately, the water supply ran low, and people slowly had to drift away, and by the middle of the century, the town had pretty well faded away.

 

It was a really strange place! The buildings are very spread out, and apparently, according to the park ranger who came by in the late afternoon, these were all the buildings that existed. It was strange because Doreen and I were the only ones here all day, except for this short visit from the park ranger. I walked all around and looked in windows of many of the buildings. There was a visitor center, and the door was open, but there was no one there, so I turned on the lights and walked around and viewed the few pictures etc.

 

All the buildings were locked up, so I just took a few pictures through windows. This is the parlor of the Allensworth home.

 

And here is another picure through the window of another home.

 

The two room school house was quite a nice building.

 

And here is one of the class rooms, with a bit of reflection from the window I was taking the picture through.

 

This is the original school building, which later became the library. And you can see the campground in the background with Miss Travelaire the only occupant. And, being in the large San Joaquin Valley of Central California, the whole place is very flat. Through our travels today we passed all sorts of agricultural land, nut trees, grape vines as far as the eye could see (table grapes and raison grapes, not wine grapes apparently, according to the park ranger).

 

We're back down to just a couple of hundred feet above sea level here, and the afternoon was pleasant (similar to Victoria summers) and sunny, but not warm like the first couple of weeks of our trip.