When Historic Buildings Move, The Buzz Can Be Quite Loud

As members of the Santa Clarita Valley Historical Society well know, it’s not easy moving a historic building.

A powerful crane must be rented to lift the structure off its foundation and onto an equally powerful truck, which carries the building oh so slowly to its new resting site.

Then, sometimes, there are bees.

Colonies of angry bees have been one of many obstacles--from low-hanging power lines to narrow bridges--the society has confronted over the years while moving historic houses, a school and even a train station to Heritage Junction Historical Park in Newhall.

Bees like to build their nests in the rotting wood of old, abandoned buildings--the kind the society likes to save. Checking for apian interlopers is now standard procedure when the society prepares to move a new acquisition to the historical park.

This week a ranch house dating from the 1870s was moved from behind Six Flags Magic Mountain in Valencia to the park eight miles away. The Newhall Ranch House, the seventh building at the park, was part of the famed Newhall Ranch purchased by land baron Henry Mayo Newhall in the last century.

Society members say the 4,000-square-foot house has been used as a home, a storage shed and even a stable. The two-story structure was cut into two pieces and hauled to the park over two nights.

Beekeepers said they could not remove some hives embedded in the walls and the insects were killed before the trip. “You hate to kill them,” said Paul Kreutzer, society president.

But there was little choice. Society members recalled the time they hoisted up a tiny chapel for its journey from Saugus in 1987.

“The entire bottom of the chapel was one gigantic honeycomb,” Kreutzer said. “Our mover got stung three or four times.”

Bees were the heroes, however, during the drama surrounding the society’s effort to save the Mitchell Adobe, a tiny schoolhouse built by Col. Thomas Mitchell for children in Sulphur Springs in 1879.

Society members formed a human chain to protect the building from a bulldozer that was going to clear the spot for a developer four years ago. Shortly after sheriff’s deputies forced the protesters to disperse, the bulldozer rammed the building, letting loose a swarm of bees which, appropriately, made a beeline for the driver.

“He backed off,” Kreutzer recalled.

The bee attack stalled the adobe razing long enough for the society to negotiate with the developer, who agreed to permit the preservationists to dismantle the schoolhouse. As Sandra Forbes, a society member, put it: “They were about to lose the battle when Mother Nature intervened.”

The adobe is now being restored in the heritage park.

Last year the society tried three times to move the Edison house, a 1920s bungalow. Huge snowdrifts near Gorman blocked the moving company from reaching Santa Clarita for the first attempt.

The snow melted in time for the second effort, but the mover never showed up. He mistakenly drove to Palmdale. The third attempt proceeded without incident.

Then there was the time the society moved the 103-year-old Saugus Train Station in 1980. The station, which weighed 90 tons, had to be carted across railroad tracks and railroad officials assured the preservationists that a train would not disturb the move.

But as the truck lumbered up to the tracks, spectators spotted a glowing light in the distance.

“We were just starting for the tracks and boom, here comes a train,” said Jerry Reynolds, a Santa Clarita Valley historian. “The truck was right up to the crossing gate when it started to drop. It came down inches in front of the truck.”

The movers got another shock, so to speak, when they discovered the station was too tall to pass beneath a 16,000-volt power line. But they were not concerned because the power to the line was to have been cut off before the journey.

But an electrical worker, when asked if the line was truly dead, hollered down from a power pole: “Oh, no it’s not!” His other comments are not printable, Reynolds said.

After the power was cut, the line was lowered to the ground and the station trundled away.

This week, the journey of the Newhall Ranch House was momentarily halted Tuesday morning when the San Joaquin Movers, a Bakersfield company, discovered that the house wouldn’t pass through a narrow bridge crossing the south fork of the Santa Clara River, Forbes said.

The company quickly jacked up the building so the sides could pass over the bridge’s retaining walls. The ranch house arrived at the heritage park safely and now sits on wooden pilings while workers prepare a new foundation.

As workers hammered together the wooden forms for the foundation on Friday, Forbes said the historical society has been told that a ghost has been known to inhabit the building. It remains to be seen, she said, whether the ghost made the trip.