Richland Farms — The Acre

Drive a car ten blocks south of the courthouse and you will, without warning, end up on a residential street where every other front yard has a goat, a chicken coop, or a horse. This is not a neighborhood that survived. This is a neighborhood that was protected, on purpose, by people who understood — going back to the 1860s — what would happen if it wasn't. Richland Farms was platted in 1867 by Griffith D. Compton, the city's namesake, with a one-acre minimum lot size and a deed restriction allowing livestock. By the 1930s, when most of southwest Los Angeles was being plowed under to build housing tracts, Richland was already a Black agricultural neighborhood — sold parcel by parcel to Black families pushed out of central Los Angeles by redlining. By 1950 it was the largest contiguous block of Black-owned agricultural land west of the Mississippi. The acre — that one-acre lot size that the city has, against enormous developer pressure, refused to subdivide for a hundred and fifty years — is the reason the Compton Cowboys have land to stable horses on. It is the reason a child living in Compton in 2024 can wake up to the sound of a rooster. It is the reason the city's farmers' market still has produce that did not, technically, leave Compton. This exhibit, built into a corner room with a window that looks south toward the Farms, walks the visitor through the deed restriction's history. The original 1867 plat. A handful of land transfers from the 1930s that went, against the grain of the era, to Black families. A 1968 zoning fight, won by neighbors, that kept the acre intact when the city was being pressured to densify. The exhibit's centerpiece is a wall of present-day photographs, donated by Richland families, of the animals their kids are currently raising. The agricultural neighborhood is not a museum piece. The acre is still legally enforceable. The chickens, this morning, are awake.