GREAT ESCAPES FAR FROM THE MADDENING CROWD : SANTA ANA : Discovery Museum Offers Rare Peek Into Past

In the midst of a Santa Ana industrial park is a bit of Orange County’s past just waiting to be discovered.

At the Discovery Museum, on Harvard Street near Fairview Street, visitors can step back in time and find out what life was like around the turn of the century.

Set on 11 acres, the museum includes four historic buildings, a citrus orchard, 300 rose bushes and the museum office.

The centerpiece is the Kellogg House. Built in 1898 by Hiram Clay Kellogg, Santa Ana’s first city engineer, the two-story, dove-gray Victorian house has been refurbished and features authentic period furnishings and a circular staircase built around a ship’s mast.

The museum has offered tours since 1985. On weekdays, they are offered by appointment for children in the morning and senior citizens, Scouts and other groups in the afternoon. Prices for tours vary. On weekends, visitors can take self-guided tours from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. The charge is 50 cents for children and $1 for adults. Special events, such as candlelight tours for the Christmas season, are frequently offered.

In the morning, tours are geared to children in the third and fourth grades, when Orange County history is taught in local schools.

“They get to touch things and see things here,” teacher Marilyn Delameter said on a recent visit to the museum with her fourth-grade class from the First Southern Baptist Christian School of Fountain Valley. “It makes them more aware of how time has changed.”

Students are also enthusiastic about the experience.

One of the more popular areas is the textiles room which houses vintage clothing and shoes along with pictures of early Orange County residents dressed from head to toe for a beach party.

“Would you want to wear bathing suits like that?” museum guide Nancy Brosnan asks children to resounding choruses of “No!”

But the children eagerly line up to slip on antique clothing reproductions and admire themselves in a full-length mirror.

In the kitchen, visitors get a chance to see and touch kitchen gadgets of the era and churn cream into butter, sampling their product on saltine crackers.

In other areas, visitors can see a stereoscope create 3-D vision, listen to a Victrola record player and an old telephone or crank clothes through a ringer after scrubbing them on a washboard.

The Kellogg House was built on Orange Avenue in Santa Ana but moved to its present site in 1980, Johnson said. When the Santa Ana Unified School District donated it to the nonprofit agency that operates the museum in 1981, it was an empty shell, she said. The other structures--the Magg House, a carriage barn and water tour--were moved in 1982 but have yet to be restored.