Rebuilding Appreciation for Old Farmhouses : Preservation: Where there once were thousands across the county, there now are only a few. The modern-day residents working to restore them say tract-house owners don’t know what they’re missing.

The century was 10 years old when John Cook built his home among the walnut groves of southwest Anaheim. That year Cook was one of 34,436 people living in a farming county whose population--it was boldly predicted--would someday reach 100,000.

Local farm production included everything from chicken eggs to chili peppers. Harvests of cabbage, wheat, tomatoes and apricots would reach into the millions of pounds. Among the rich bounty was the produce from 1,347,425 fruit trees representing 10 different varieties. More than two-thirds of those trees bore the county’s namesake crop.

Orange County was an agricultural promised land, and Cook’s two-story, Colonial Revival mansion rose like a monument near the rural heart of it.

In 1910, there were 4,783 farms spread across the fertile county landscape. Scores of farmhouses sat among the orchards and fields. Most were single-story, clapboard structures, far less grand than Cook’s great keep. But they were sturdy and practical, and they fit the purpose of the land.

Eighty years after John Cook moved his wife and three children into their new home on Walnut Street, agricultural Orange County has nearly been subdivided out of existence.

Today, local preservationists estimate that as few as 90 farm homes remain intact in a county where hundreds--if not thousands--were built between 1890 and the late 1920s.

“Most of the older houses people see today are not farm homes,” said Diann Marsh, a Santa Ana artist and preservationist who has surveyed 2,500 historic houses throughout the county. “The old historic neighborhoods of cities like Santa Ana were for urban dwellers. The farm homes, on the other hand, stood out in the fields and orchards by themselves.”

In a sense, they still do.

With their wood construction, large front porches, sense of individual style, and mature growths of trees and landscaping, the old farm homes have become architectural oddities among the efficient sameness of the modern suburb.

That any of the houses survive is due largely to the practice of developers in the late 1940s and 1950s of retaining the old structures and building new tract housing on the land around them. Orange trees from the original groves were often left in the back yards of many of the new mass-produced homes--a gesture that preserved a slim but real link with the land’s agricultural past.

No more, Marsh says.

“Today there’s the new and perfect idea,” she said. “That’s why people moved to Irvine and cities like it . . . because it’s new and perfect.”

The old farmhouses that dotted the countryside proved to be an affront to modern central planning. The land was scraped clean of its heritage, and a new urban order installed.

Marsh believes that, historically speaking, the county is lucky that the planned community arrived too late on the scene to completely wipe out the old farm dwellings. As it is, she says, the surviving homes are often crowded on lots a fraction of their original size.

But if the old homes have lost space, they have gained the value of being a rarity.

Marsh says that, increasingly, “people are discovering just how special these homes are. They specifically search out the old farm residences because they want to live in a home that not only has some history to it, but character as well.”

Bill Flint of Santa Ana and his wife, Barbara, were seeking just such a house when they bought their Craftsman-style farm home seven years ago.

“I always feel that if you’re going to move into one of these homes, you ought to spend as much time getting to know its history as possible because you’re going to be a part of that history,” Flint said.

The history of Flint’s farm home can be traced to 1904 and a citrus grower named Christopher Peltzes. Back then the newly constructed house was headquarters for a farm operation that probably included walnut groves as well as orange trees. Today, it is surrounded by a neighborhood of custom homes.

“Actually, the Peltzes’ home for years was just about the last house on the last road out of town in this area,” Flint said.

Peltzes, his wife and three children apparently lived a quiet life among the orchards of rural Santa Ana. The country idyll came to an abrupt end in 1918, however, when the family car was struck by a train at a nearby track crossing, killing all five family members.

The house sat vacant for several years after the tragedy before it was bought by Judge Ray Billingsley, one of the signers of Orange County’s Charter, according to Flint’s research. The judge’s son, Harlowe, a carpenter, lived in the house for more than 40 years.

Flint says the house was in “fairly good shape when we bought it. We haven’t done a lot of restoration to it.”

One of the special attractions of the home, he says, is a tract of orange trees bordering the property--one of the county’s few remaining suburban groves. Flint believes that these trees were probably planted by either Peltzes or Billingsley as part of the original farm.

“It’s amazing that the grove is still here considering this area was subdivided years ago,” he said. “I may be able to say someday that I live next to the last orange grove in Orange County.”

While Flint and his wife have considered putting the home on the National Register of Historic Places, they say their ultimate goal--after their three children are grown--is to turn the house into a small bed-and-breakfast place.

“With five bedrooms we’ll have the space, plus it’d be a great way for others to enjoy the house as much as we have,” he said.

It will also be a way of raising funds to help offset the sometimes alarming restoration and maintenance costs associated with all-wood houses built 70 or 80 years ago.

When restaurant owners Lois Ramont and Marilyn Watson bought the John Cook farmhouse in Anaheim in 1983, they knew that the 6,000-square-foot mansion would have to pay its own way.

“It’s a wonderful house, but it takes a lot of money to keep it going,” Ramont said.

Ramont and her husband, Dick, first tried to buy the eight-bedroom home in 1974 for use as a private residence. “We thought it’d be a great place to raise our seven kids,” she said. “Unfortunately, we didn’t get it at the time, but I kept my eye on it.”

Nearly a decade passed before the home became available again. This time Ramont and her business partner bought the home and quickly converted it into a bed-and-breakfast. Since then, the two women have alternated living on-site to care for as many as 19 guests at a time.

Saving the large farm estates often hinges on a structure’s adaptability to other uses. Former homes have been turned into small apartment buildings, antique shops, restaurants, schoolhouses and museums.

The Cook house itself served for a time in the early 1970s as a rest home, while elegant dwellings--such as the 83-year-old John Nenno house in Placentia--have been restored and converted into professional offices.

Increasingly, the more historically important homes must be moved to designated heritage parks like those in Garden Grove and Santa Ana to save them from the wrecking ball.

Not every endangered home is rescued in time.

During the past year, several farm homes have been torn down to make way for new construction, including one house in Placentia that was built by the pioneer Chapman family, according to Marsh. Another Placentia landmark, the Samuel Kraemer Sr. home--an impressive brick structure built in 1904 by the son of one of the county’s first settlers--was also recently destroyed, she said.

Bruce Sinclair, president of the Orange County Historical Society, says an old farm home is often bulldozed before anyone realizes it was in danger. Or, on rare occasions, before anyone in the preservationist ranks even knew that the house existed.

Such could be the case with one of the best-hidden farm dwellings in Orange County.

At Disneyland, in what is called the “backstage” area of the park, is the last surviving farmhouse original to the property when Walt Disney began buying orange groves in the 1950s.

This single-story, 1920s-era home once belonged to orange growers Dolly and Owen Pope. Today, as chickens scratch in the dirt nearby, it sits secluded in a shady, quiet area, buttressed on one side by a steep berm of wooded earth and on the other by horse corrals, barns and livestock pens where the theme park’s live animals are stabled and cared for.

The old farmhouse now serves as offices for the park’s backstage ranch operation. During its 35-year reign as Disneyland’s oldest structure, it has been moved several times about the property, according to park sources. These same sources fear that its present location may also be its last because of a planned expansion of the park’s themed show area.

John McClintock, a senior publicist for Disneyland, says that while a new attraction based on the Indiana Jones film character is planned for the area where the house and corrals are located, “no ground has been broken yet. Everything is still very much up in the air” as to whether the house will be moved or torn down.

Sinclair, for one, believes that Disney will eventually act to save the home--either by continuing its use as an office at a new ranch location, or perhaps by donating it to a local preservation group for relocation to a heritage park setting.

“We’re very interested in seeing that the house is preserved,” he said. “Disney has shown great civic awareness in the past about these things. They’ve given money and awards to local groups for historical preservation, including the Orange County Historical Society. I’m certain we can work with them on this.”

Local historian and preservationist Judy Liebeck says saving the smaller farmhouses is as important as preserving the great farm estates.

“Many of the small farmhouses in the Irvine area were occupied by tenant farmers,” she explained. “This was the historical reality of the area, and as such shouldn’t be allowed to disappear.”

At one time Irvine had the finest collection of tenant farmhouses in the southwestern United States, possibly in the entire nation, Liebeck says. As many as 100 homes were clustered in camps and work centers throughout the area. Today, only about 20 are left.

In what could be called an experiment in practical preservation, three of those homes are being restored by the Irvine Ranch Water District for use as on-site housing for district employees and their families.

According to Peer Swan, president of the water district board, moving the structures from their prior locations to district property was a winning proposition for everyone involved.

“Judy (Liebeck) and her people saved some homes they thought were historically important, and we now have a way to house people close to our facilities who can respond quickly in case of an earthquake or other emergency,” he explained.

Perhaps the most historically significant of the three homes is a sturdy three-bedroom house built in 1905 by rancher James Irvine as a residence for the manager of the Irvine bean-and-grain warehouse. According to Liebeck, Irvine expected his 12-year-old son--James Irvine III--to occupy the house when he took over as warehouse manager.

Although 30 years would pass, the younger Irvine never moved into the house. He died in 1935 of double pneumonia before he could assume the important management position his father had planned for him.

The James Irvine Jr. home--as it is commonly called today--was heavily vandalized at its previous location on Sand Canyon Avenue near the historic center of East Irvine. Ceilings and walls had been kicked in; fires had been set directly on the hardwood floors.

“You could see the burn marks from the fires,” Swan said. “It’s amazing that the whole house didn’t burn down.”

It has taken five months of restoration work by water district employees to repair the damage, including more than 650 hours of labor on the part of the home’s new tenants, district supervisor Johnnie Johannessen, his wife, Linda, and their two children.

According to Linda Johannessen, the many evenings and weekends she and her husband have spent sanding, sawing and hammering the old home back into livable shape have been a combination working vacation and endurance test.

“I told my husband when I saw how much work had to be done that we’d either be divorced at the end, or (the experience) would draw us even closer together,” she laughed.

Because all three homes suffered structural damage due to the effects of neglect and time, rotted wood was a serious problem. Ironically, the newest house--circa 1910 or 1915--was the worst off.

“There’s still quite a lot of work to do on this particular house,” Swan said. “A lot more rotted wood needs to be replaced before anyone can move into it.”

While workers were inspecting the extent of damage to the home, they noticed that some of the wood showed clear signs of charring. From the uneven pattern of the blackened marks, it was determined that these timbers and planks probably came from another, even older house, which had burned more than 80 years before and was cannibalized for its salvageable wood.

In far better shape is the oldest of the three dwellings--a 1900-vintage three-bedroom house originally located in the middle of what is now the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station--set to become the new home for another district supervisor, Wayne Posey, and his family.

According to district research, the home was first occupied by John Cook’s brother George, an industrious man who at one time leased the world’s largest lima bean field--17,000 acres--from James Irvine. After the Marine Corps landed in 1941, the house was moved to a site not far from the James Irvine Jr. home.

The Poseys and their neighbors won’t have to worry about the encroachment of civilization due to a peculiarity of geography--all three homes sit at the bottom of a drained duck pond surrounded by an earth berm and, beyond that, about 500 acres of protected wetlands and wooded area that includes the San Joaquin Marsh at nearby UC Irvine.

Cindi Posey, who has been helping her husband and other district employees with the restoration effort, says the bucolic charm of the location is “incredible. Sometimes we’ll sit out on the porch and see this natural area, yet in the distance we can see all the buildings, and the planes taking off (from John Wayne Airport). It’s like we’ve got a little bit of the country right here, but without being miles from nowhere.”

Swan says the area around the homes “is now a dust bowl” but in the weeks ahead will be planted with natural grasses, flowers and trees.

When work is finished, the smallest and most exclusive neighborhood in Irvine will take its place as a rural anachronism on the county’s sleek urban landscape.

Johnnie Johannessen says the historic appeal of living in a home almost a century old is heightened by the thought of living in a country atmosphere set apart from people and development.

“My wife and I have lived in Orange County all our lives,” he said. “We’ve watched a lot of the open space and farmland disappear. Living in one of these homes will be sort of like how it was before all the building began.”

Standing on the home’s wooden front porch, he watched in the distance as a jetliner started its steep climb from the airport. The plane moved silently in the early evening sky, already too far away to be heard. Only the sound of birds from the wetlands drifted in the air as a cool breeze picked up from the southwest.

“We’ve been lucky to be able to help save a piece of history,” he said, gathering his family around him on the old porch of their new home. “The bonus is that now we get to live in it.”

Clark Sharon is a regular contributor to Home Design.