Old John Ballard

County leaders on Tuesday approved a resolution asking a federal agency to rename Negrohead Mountain near Malibu in honor of a black pioneer who settled in the area in the 19th century.

The peak would be known as Ballard Mountain, after John Ballard, if the U.S. Geological Survey's Board on Geographic Names grants the request by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.

The switch would "honor the man, as a man, for the contributions he made," said Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who made the name-change motion.

The name of the mountain, at 2,031 feet the tallest in the area, originally contained a racial slur that even was found on early government topographic maps. It was changed to "negro" in the 1960s.

According to its Web site, the USGS does not encourage geographic name changes, but among its recognized classes of name changes are "those made to eliminate particular name problems as in cases involving derogatory names."

Ballard was a former Kentucky slave who came West around 1860 and died in 1905. He and his wife moved to Los Angeles, where he was a teamster and became prominent in the small but growing black community. He was part of a small group that founded Los Angeles' African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1869.

But in 1880, the Ballard family moved about 50 miles west to a valley in the Santa Monica Mountains near what is now the community of Seminole Hot Springs. By the turn of the century he and his daughter, one of his seven children, owned 320 acres obtained under the federal Homestead Act.