GREAT ESCAPES FAR FROM THE MADDENING CROWD : PLACENTIA : Key Ranch Holds Some Local History Treasures

History hangs like sweet perfume on the old Key Ranch in Placentia. Once home to one of the area’s pioneer citrus growers, the turn-of-the-century landmark provides visitors today with a glance back at the county’s agricultural roots.

Built in 1898 by George Benn Key--then superintendent of the Semi-Tropical Fruit Co., which developed and planted California’s first commercial Valencia orange groves--the rustic Victorian-style house is the oldest standing home in Placentia. In fact, three of the original orange trees planted by Key in 1893 still stand in the grove that fronts the house like a barrier against time.

Declared an Orange County Historical Landmark, the venerable house and surrounding 2.2 acres of what was originally a 20-acre ranch just off Bastanchury Road was purchased from Key’s son, George Gilman Key, by the county in 1980 in order to ensure its preservation.

Something of a local landmark himself, the younger Key had returned to his family’s ranch with his wife, Hannah, in 1945, after retiring from a successful career in the oil industry, according to Linda Lorenzi, an Orange County park ranger. Lorenzi has spent most of the past five years conducting guided tours of the ranch and cataloguing the thousand of artifacts that Key, who died earlier this year, began collecting in the early 1960s.

Except for the family’s original entry rug, Lorenzi said most of the first-floor furnishings are from the 1940s, when Key moved back into the house.

The second story, however, is redolent with relics from Orange County’s early days.

The donor names on the hallway exhibit of old schoolbooks reads like a veritable Who’s Who of Orange County founding families. Inside a bedroom bedecked with classic orange crate labels, Teddy Roosevelt’s bully old face adorns a 1912 Progressive Party (Bull Moose) battle flag that hangs above a faded newspaper proclaiming the opening of Hoover Dam.

Virtually up until his death at age 92, Key remained active, tinkering in his outdoor workshops and tending to the Verse Garden, where Key had placed excerpts from his published poems.

Today the ranch is lush with an assortment of well-tended greenery from bamboo to bird of paradise blooms.

The Key Ranch is open for guided tours Monday through Friday, by appointment only. For information call (714) 528-4260.