Last Rites Offered for Capistrano Matriarch

Her body clothed in black Spanish fiesta garb and borne by a horse-drawn wagon, Matriarch of San Juan Capistrano Lucana Forster Isch was buried Monday in the old mission cemetery that once was part of her great-grandfather’s 200,000-acre empire.

Mrs. Isch, 83, who died last week from complications of a stroke, was the great-granddaughter of John Forster, an English sea captain who became a Mexican citizen and acquired vast ranch lands that stretched from what is now El Toro to Oceanside.

Friends and relatives who walked in the funeral procession from Mission San Juan Capistrano down Ortega Highway and up a hill to the parish cemetery remembered her Monday as a quiet, serious woman who loved old-fashioned ceremonies but who, in the words of one, “just had to look into your eyes and you knew you were in a whole bunch of trouble.”

“She was a stern woman,” said John Nicholas Isch, one of her four children. “She’d raise hell with anybody.”

The funeral reflected Mrs. Isch’s rancho heritage, with horses leading the procession and several mourners wearing cowboy boots and hats, including Orange County Sheriff Brad Gates, a San Juan Capistrano native who grew up half a block away from the Isch home. “She raised me like a mother,” Gates said. “She was a great, dignified lady--the last true matriarch of this town. She is a piece of history we can never have back.”

Mrs. Isch was named Matriarch of San Juan Capistrano in 1976 in recognition of both her lineage and her contributions to the town’s cultural organizations. She was active in the Historical Society and the San Juan Capistrano Women’s Club, and liked to wear fine Spanish dresses to official functions, said Pamela Gibson, a local historian.

In town, she was almost always seen with a red bandanna wrapped around her white hair, said Jeanie Bost, manager of the Swallows Inn, a cowboy saloon with a brass plaque honoring Matriarch Lucana Isch at one end of the bar. “She used to come in during the day and drink a glass of orange juice--a vodka and orange juice only if she was with her son,” Bost said. “She was a very lovely lady, and I’ll always remember her red railroad scarf. I used to kid her that I was going to buy her a blue one, then what would she do?”

Six pallbearers placed six red bandannas along with their white gloves and carnations on Mrs. Isch’s casket before Father Paul Martin, the mission pastor, threw the first handful of dirt upon it.

Prominent Family

Most of the Forster landholdings have long since been sold, but in the last years of Mexican rule and through the first 40 years of California statehood, the Forster family was among the most prominent in Southern California.

John Forster, born in Liverpool, England, made his way to Mexico and then to California, where he married Ysidora Pico, sister of the last Mexican governor of California, Pio Pico.

In 1845, for $710, Forster and a partner bought the San Juan Capistrano Mission grounds, which were ordered sold by the Mexican government as part of the secularization campaign following the Revolution. The sale was ruled invalid by President Abraham Lincoln in 1865, but by that time Forster had purchased or acquired through his Pico family connections land grants to Rancho Mission Viejo, Rancho Trabuco, Rancho Los Desechos and finally Rancho Santa Margarita--now Camp Pendleton--where Forster moved his family when he had to vacate the mission.

The Forster ranch empire was hit hard by drought in the 1860s and became heavily indebted, and upon John Forster’s death in 1882, his sons Juan and Marco sold Rancho Mission Viejo and Rancho Santa Margarita to Jerome O’Neill, head of the next great ranching family in south Orange County.

Marco Forster moved his family back near another of its holdings, Rancho Boca de la Playa, and it was there, in what is now San Juan Capistrano, that Lucana Forster was born, to Frank and Ada Forster, in 1902.

Lucana drove a Model T to Santa Ana High School before a high school was built in San Juan Capistrano. In 1922, she became Capistrano Union High School’s first graduating senior, but she postponed a formal ceremony a year so she wouldn’t receive her diploma alone, Tony Forster, a nephew, said.

In 1927, she married Robert Maurice Isch of Laguna Beach, whose family operated that town’s first general store, according to Gibson. Mr. Isch died in 1947, and Lucana Isch never remarried.

She is survived by four children, Maurice Forster Isch of San Clemente, John Nicholas Isch of San Juan Capistrano, Barbara Lucana Goodwin of Capistrano Beach and Dorothy Regina Teer of Oroville, 13 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.