Dried out: big ag threatens clean water in rural California

Residents of Allensworth, a historic town established by a former slave, have struggled with clean water access for decades

One day in 1979, Nettie Morrison, then 44 and living near Bakersfield, California, announced she was moving to a tiny, rural town called Allensworth, 40 miles north. Hardly anyone had even heard of it, and those who had thought she was crazy. "People said, 'Why would you want to move out there?'" recalls her daughter, Denise Kadara. "'There's nothing for you up there.' But she knew it was a historically black town and wanted to be a part of it."

Colonel Allen Allensworth, a former slave who rose to become a Union officer during the American civil war, had founded the eponymous town in 1908, when he bought 2,700 acres of alkali flats to establish a black utopia in a part of the San Joaquin Valley known as the Tulare Basin. By 1913, some 1,200 people from across the country had responded to Allensworth's call - sent out via newspaper advertisements - to build the "Tuskegee of the west". Back then, abundant clear water flowed from artesian wells, enough to drink and to irrigate crops of alfalfa, sugar beets and corn, along with feed for livestock.