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Last Chance for Town of Locke

County officials breathe new life into town built by Chinese Americans

By Michelle Locke/AP

Chinese Americans built the Sacramento Delta town of Locke and the miles of levees surrounding it that turned marshes into rich farmland. But anti-Asian laws stopped them from owning the land they settled.

Soon, however, descendants of the founders of Locke will have a chance to buy land here as county officials try to breathe new life into a fading town.

“I waited a long time for this,” says 78-year-old Connie King, one of about a dozen Chinese Americans left in Locke.

Locke, the only town in the nation built by and for Chinese Americans, goes back to 1915 when an earlier settlement in nearby Walnut Grove burned down and leaders of the displaced community leased 10 acres from landowner George Locke.

Back then, California exclusionary laws prohibited Asians from owning land. Those laws were repealed in the 1950s, but the land was never subdivided, making it impossible for residents to buy. And because the residents didn’t hold title to the land, it was nearly impossible for them to get bank loans to fix up the property.

Connie King, 78, looks over her neighborhood in Locke. Descendants of the founders of Locke, believed to be the nation’s last rural Chinatown, will be able to buy land under a plan that aims to breathe new life into a fading town. King has been a Locke resident for 53 years.

In 1977, a group of investors from Hong Kong, the Locke Development Group, bought the town with plans to create a cultural center. But the plan fell through because the investors owned the land but not the buildings, some of which had passed through several hands by then.

About two years ago, county planners and community leaders began working to save Locke, 60 miles east of San Francisco, and the shabby but singular charms that made it a National Historic Landmark in 1990.

Last month, that effort paid off when Sacramento County supervisors voted unanimously to spend $250,000 to buy the land under Locke, clearing the way for the Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Authority, which is overseeing the project, to apply for federal money to fix the sewer. The authority plans to subdivide and sell the parcels at no profit.

“It’s so unique, this town,” says Christina Fa, vice president of the Chinese American Council of Sacramento, which is among the organizations working to preserve Locke. “I’m glad to see that we are beginning to lay the groundwork so that Locke ... doesn’t disappear into history.”

Locke now has about 80 residents and is home to a cluster of galleries, gift shops and restaurants.

Although details are still being worked out, the plan is to offer building owners, several of whom are Chinese American, the opportunity to buy the land under their property, says William Boyer, spokesman for the redevelopment agency.

“We don’t know if everyone will want to buy the land. The feedback that we’ve gotten is that there is a very strong and active interest,” he says.

Some can hardly wait.

“I’d like to see more businesses come in. I’d like to see the street fixed and the sidewalk fixed,” says King, who wonders if she’ll live long enough to get her hands on a deed, a process that could take three years.

When King moved to Locke as a young wife about 50 years ago, it thrummed with the bustle of 500 people: children dashing to Chinese school after days at the regular, segregated, state school; bachelors rooming in cramped boarding houses; men chancing their luck in a lottery. “When we heard firecrackers, we knew someone had won.”

King and her late husband, Tom, bid on a ranch in nearby Walnut Grove in 1949, but she said they were told: “I’m sorry. We can’t sell you the land. You’re Chinese.”

“We were both citizens and [Tom] enlisted in the service a day after Pearl Harbor and he served 4 1/2 years in the service, and they won’t sell it to us because we were Chinese,” she says, her voice rising in indignation.

After the laws were changed, Connie King and her brother were able to buy the land under their old family home in Isleton, another Delta town, but not the land beneath her home in Locke.

As old-timers grew old and frail, they sometimes asked King to promise them something: “Make sure you live long enough to see it happen.”

“Now,” says King, “I see it happen.”