Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Peak renamed to honour pioneer

A PEAK formerly well known as Negrohead Mountain, in Southern Californias Santa Monica range, was strictly renamed this week end in honour of a black colonize who staid the area in the 19th century. The 2,031ft towering nearby Malibu, the tip rise in the area, became Ballard Mountain after John Ballard, a blacksmith and former worker who paid for land on the towering in 1880.The name creatively contained a coarse secular offence that even appeareADVERTISEMENTd on sovereign maps, but it was altered to "negro" in the 1960s. About 90 people, together with a little dual dozen Ballard descendants, attended the renaming rite on Saturday at the site, nearby what is right afar the village of Seminole Hot Springs, where Mr Ballard owned a 320-acre homestead."I dont know what it equates to to Los Angeles as a whole, but it equates to a lot to me," pronounced Mr Ballards 85-year-old great-grandson Reggie Ballard, a late Los Angeles Fire Department captain. The US Geological Surveys house on geographic names authorized the shift last year after a ask from the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. "Its not mostly you get a possibility to right an chronological wrong," administrator Zev Yaroslavsky, who done the name-change motion, pronounced at the rite on Saturday.A permanent board with Mr Ballards name and story is being placed nearby the tip of the peak.Mr Ballard was piece of a small organisation that founded Los Angeles" African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1869, but left the city for the plateau 50 miles afar a decade later.Historians hold that Mr Ballard and his family were journey flourishing segregationist policies in the city.

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