By Joe Blackstock
Inland Valley Daily Bulletin
“An Appeal to Colored Men” was the bold message of opportunity in an advertisement in a Los Angeles newspaper on May 1, 1910.
It spoke of a mining and agricultural colony planned by, and for, African-Americans in far eastern San Bernardino County by the Eldorado Gold Star Mining Co.
The chance to have their own land and leave behind some of the pains of prejudice convinced the family of young Richard W. Hodnett, along with a few dozen others, to give up the trappings of “civilization” for a hard life in the desert.
More than a century ago, they settled in the Lanfair Valley, a hardscrabble desert wilderness almost to the Nevada line. Homesteaders — both black and white — could become landowners if they were tough enough to endure that area’s hardships and improve their land for three years.
The story of this exodus of African-Americans from places such as Whittier, Los Angeles and Long Beach had mostly faded from memory until unearthed by Dennis G. Casebier, founder of the Mojave Desert Heritage and Cultural Association in the hamlet of Goffs, 15 miles south of Lanfair on old Route 66.
His research, including oral histories taken from about 900 former eastern Mojave Desert families, showed that racial problems were relatively infrequent among Lanfair’s homesteaders, who perhaps realized they had to work together to overcome the challenges the desert presented them every day.
Hodnett, who died in Riverside in 2003, was an infant when his family escaped to the Los Nietos area of Whittier from Catcher, Arkansas, a racially charged community where they and other African-Americans were very unwelcome, Casebier said. Shortly thereafter, his father visited Lanfair and sent for his family to join him on 160 acres at an elevation of about 4,000 feet.
“My father would tell me how beautiful the country was, how there was land up there that could be worked up,” recalled Hodnett, during an oral history given to Casebier in 1999. “He liked farming and getting all that land up there for homesteading.”
The idea of opportunity for the Hodnetts and other African-Americans was first described in the Los Angeles Herald of April 24, 1910, by Howard Folke, vice president of Eldorado Gold Star, a wholly African-American company with mining interests in nearby Searchlight, Nevada.
In the article, Folke outlined an ambitious plan to create a “Tuskegee Institute West” to teach African-Americans the skills of mining as well as agriculture in the spirit of “the great work of Booker T. Washington in making practical farmers of thousands of young men of his race.”
The San Bernardino Sun on Jan. 10, 1911, wrote that “a veritable agricultural empire” was being created under the direction of G.W. Harris, a Pasadena minister, and Folke. What is still unclear is the actual purpose of Folke and the mining company in encouraging black families to join the Lanfair Valley colony, which was largely on public land open to homesteading.
Hodnett said he believed it was Folke who urged his father to not only leave Arkansas but later pull up stakes in Whittier and head for the eastern Mojave.
By early 1911, six African-American families had settled in the Lanfair Valley, according to Casebier. The Sun article said one black settler, William Jones of Whittier, had already sowed 80 acres of winter wheat.
Casebier said initially the homesteaders in the Lanfair area were mostly spread into two communities.
The original site of Lanfair, the meeting place and post office for most of its white settlers, was a couple of miles west of the railroad line that ran between Goffs and Searchlight. A post office for the African-American settlers at the Lanfair railroad siding was known as Dunbar, which Casebier guesses was named for African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, who had died in 1906.
The two settlements later merged at Dunbar, with two post offices briefly operated in the same building. The Dunbar post office, whose postmaster was Folke, closed in May 1914 after 18 months of operation.
It was hardly easy living for the settlers, some of whom probably had little in the way of farming experience. They regularly faced the extremes of winter cold and summer heat, not to mention the isolation of an area reached only by railroad and many miles of dirt roads.
To educate the children of the area, the county formed the Lanfair School District on Jan. 13, 1913, later building a school there.
One white woman who was a student at the Lanfair School told Casebier she really never recalled any discrimination against the black children there. “They were kids to me,” she said. “I didn’t care whether they were pink, red or white.”
It wasn’t all perfect, though, as oral histories indicated that an informal white “social club” created for parties and dances did exclude their African-American neighbors.
In their first full year, the new homesteaders of the Lanfair Valley were welcomed by a winter of abundant rainfall, a godsend that proved to be the exception rather than the rule.
“It rained a lot of up there in Lanfair in that year, and in the spring, as far as you could see, was golden poppies all over the valley,” recalled Hodnett. “It rained so much up there (my father) could grow a good crop of grass and barley, oats and corn.”
That first year, ranchers, most without wells, produced a relative abundance of crops, part of which was shipped by train and sold in Searchlight and at neighboring mines.
The Hodnetts, living a couple of miles east of the Lanfair station, also had cows, horses, mules and chickens. Followers of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, family members were largely vegetarians, growing much of their food in a large garden. Occasionally, they would kill a cow or turkey to supplement their diet.
“We weren’t too pressed for money. There wasn’t much in the way of necessities to buy up there,” said Hodnett, who as an adult would operate a nursery for many years in Riverside. To help out the family, his mother worked several days a week at a hotel south of them in Goffs.
But after that first wet winter, nature returned things to normal in the east Mojave. Rainfall was an all-too-infrequent visitor for the homesteaders.
The Hodnetts set out many rain gutters, barrels and troughs to collect everything from each storm when it did arrive. They quickly learned never to waste a drop of water — even laundry water was collected and later poured on plants in the garden.
When things got especially dry, Hodnett said his family took their wagon out to remote watering sites to fill barrels to supplement their supply.
But despite all the challenges, many succeeded. Casebier has documented 24 African-American families, including the Hodnetts, who made it through the required three-year period and “proved up their land” to gain ownership. It is “remarkable for what it says about their persistence and their success in this difficult land,” he wrote in an article for the National Parks Service.
But it also appears that few truly wanted to make the rugged Lanfair Valley a permanent home and soon starting moving out. As an example, 64 voters participated in the 1916 presidential election in the Lanfair precinct, but by the 1924 election, there were only 27 registered voters. Seven residents cast ballots there in 1932, all for Franklin Roosevelt.
Hodnett said his father later moved the family to a farm near Needles (“The first time I experienced prejudice”) and later to Blythe.
“After he proved up the land, it was his,” Hodnett said. “But most people left there because it didn’t rain well. It was too arid up there.”
Hodnett told Casebier his family held onto the Lanfair land for many years after his father’s death, but eventually a decision was made to stop paying property taxes and give up ownership.
As the homesteaders gradually moved out, the area mostly reverted to desert rangeland for cattle. Today’s Lanfair Valley, now in the Mojave National Preserve, is not much different from the way it looked when African-American families first arrived to make a go at desert farming.
Casebier said one of the most interesting experiences he had while living in Goffs was to meet up with a very elderly Hodnett and his family in December 2000. During their interview a year before, Casebier had offered to take him to Lanfair.
“His family had gone to ‘grandpa’ and asked what he wanted for Christmas,” said Casebier, now a resident of Bullhead City, Arizona. “He said he wanted them to take up my offer” and have him guide them to the desert area of his youth.
A large group arrived in Goffs just after Christmas, and Casebier directed them to the long-abandoned site of Lanfair and Dunbar along the still-unpaved Lanfair Road. About all that remained was pieces of the school foundation — and a lot of memories.
“Seeing him on the steps of the Lanfair School, where he was a student in the late teens, was so culturally uplifting for me,” Casebier said.
Continuing research into the African-American homesteaders in the Mojave is being undertaken in a three-year study by a team under the direction of David R. Nichols, park archaeologist of the Mojave National Preserve.
