PLACENTIA : Trees, Home Conjure Up Feel of Past

Walking up the winding drive of the George Key Ranch, ranger Michael Miniaci feels as if he is going back to turn-of-the-century Orange County.

Moving away from the noise of Bastanchury Road and the surrounding neighborhood of tract homes, the shade grows darker around the museum as the oak trees shoot skyward. The thin leaves of the towering pepper trees litter the drive. Trees bearing pomegranates, kumquats, plums and lemons grow nearby, as does a small swath of bamboo.

When the sunlight reappears it unveils the museum’s main attractions--a 144-tree Valencia orange grove, the oldest in the county at 98 years, the two-story wooden farm house erected in 1898 by the grove’s original owner, and the late owner’s collection of antique farm equipment.

“When everything is right, you can barely hear the traffic and it reminds you that in 1898 there wasn’t any traffic,” said Miniaci, who oversees the site. “Children especially have a hard time understanding that when this house was built the next farm house was miles away. You could go out on your back porch and holler and no one would hear you.”

Open to tours by appointment and operated by the Orange County Harbors, Beaches and Parks Department, the 2.2-acre ranch museum at 625 W. Bastanchury Road was sold by George G. Key in 1980 to the county for $325,000 with two conditions--that he and his wife, Hannah, could stay until they died, which happened in 1989 and 1983 respectively, and that the property, where he was born in 1898 and which his father, George B. Key, purchased in 1893, would be preserved as a museum.

The original Key property was 20 acres but the younger Key sold about 18 acres to developers in the 1960s.

George G. Key Jr., the grandson of the founder and the son of George G. Key, said that because of increasing water and tax costs and a plummet in the price of oranges, his father had little choice but to give in partly to development.

“But he had a great love for the place and over the years he had built up such a great collection he didn’t want to see it lost,” the younger Key said. “Even when he was alive, he had turned it into a museum of sorts and would invite senior citizens’ groups and school kids to come by. So when he got old, he sold it to the county because he knew his work would be carried on.”

One of the tasks ahead for Miniaci and the museum’s staff is the restoration of the hundreds of pieces of turn-of-the-century farm equipment the senior George G. Key collected, some of which was used on the Key Ranch. He purchased other pieces in the 1960s from his neighbors as the farms around the ranch were subdivided and turned into housing tracts.

In the house is furniture from the 1890s through the 1940s, photographs of north Orange County and its residents from about 1900, and scores of old books, many of them primers from the one-room school that served the area 90 years ago.

“Somebody asked me once what the value of all this was,” Miniaci said. “Well, there is no way to figure the dollar amount, but it is priceless to the history of north Orange County. . . . You could go around the world and buy duplicates of all of this stuff, but none of it would come from the farms we used to have around here.”