Extended Stay at an Old Inn : Renewal: A family is living in and sprucing up the historic Stage Stop Hotel. From its front porch, they enjoy life along busy Beach Boulevard.

In a scene dimly reminiscent of years gone by, residents of a 118-year-old house here oftentimes can be found on their front porch, happily sipping beer and energetically waving to southbound travelers on Beach Boulevard.

Their house is the venerable Stage Stop Hotel, located just south of the Santa Ana Freeway, one of this city’s major historical landmarks and once its only watering hole.

The revelers are Jackie Smith and 11 members of her family, who recently moved into the former hotel’s 11 bedrooms, four bathrooms and two kitchens. Their goal is to restore the 6,000-square-foot redwood structure to its original condition.

But after the hammers and paintbrushes are put away, the family members like to throw parties on the porch at night.

“We use any excuse to have a party,” said Smith, 50, a Tennessee native who bought the house last year for $400,000. “A whole cross-section of people come by.”

Meet the “Waltons” of Beach Boulevard, 1990s-style. Like their fictional television counterparts, this family believes in hospitality, harmony and history.

“Every day is a new day,” says Jeff Tucker, Smith’s 21-year-old son who lives with his girlfriend and huge toy collection in one of the upstairs bedrooms. “There’s always something going on.”

Of course, there were goings-on in the house long before the Smith family held their first porch party.

Built in 1875, when the future Beach Boulevard was little more than a dusty road, the building served originally as a stop for passengers on the Butterfield Stage route from San Bernardino to Huntington Beach. Resting in the shade of the building’s large lobby, passengers could catch some shut-eye, wash up or grab a quick meal and drink in an adjoining saloon.

In the late 1890s, the facility changed hands to become the Park Place Hotel. A photograph of that period shows it as the largest structure for miles, surrounded by open fields and trees. Twenty years later a new owner turned it into a boarding house for men, a use that persisted for nearly 40 years. And in the late 1950s, the old house--by then known as the Stage Stop Hotel--began its career as a private residence. A reclusive couple from Long Beach moved in, along with their numerous pet cats, each of which reportedly had its own upstairs bedroom.

Jackie Smith, who works for a roofing company in Orange, first saw the house last August when she was doing some business at Buena Park City Hall and happened to glance across the street and see the real estate sign.

“I always wanted an old house,” said Smith, who spent 20 years living in a tract home in Norwalk. “This one is great. It’s amazing. It’s historic.”

It also is big enough to house her entire family. “I didn’t want my family to leave,” she said. “I wanted us all to stay together.”

The former hotel is now home to Smith and her longtime companion, Don Berg, her four grown children (one of whom has a wife and another a live-in girlfriend), two cousins and two grandchildren. While tempers sometimes flare, Smith said, the family is generally able to spread out among the vintage home’s bedrooms, situated hotel-like along a lengthy upstairs corridor.

“We have our little spats, just like every family,” she says. “The thing about living here is that we can each go to our own rooms and pout; you can even slam things around and nobody will hear you.”

Their plans for the place are ambitious. Among other things, she said, they intend to install genuine 19th-Century carpeting, replace damaged or lost light fixtures and generally restore the house to its late-1800s condition. By mid-July, she said, they hope to open an in-house antique shop and begin giving tours.

“It’s a family venture,” Smith said. “We just like antiques.”

City officials and local historians applaud the family’s efforts. “It’s a landmark,” Roberta Kinsley, curator of the Buena Park Historical Society, said of the house. “It’s one of the few old buildings that Buena Park still has and it’s part of the town’s heritage. Everybody’s very excited” about the restoration.

According to Leslie Kyle, the city’s senior planner, the Stage Stop Hotel is the oldest of six surviving structures listed as historically significant in the city’s General Plan. While at least one other building in the city--the Bacon house--is older, she said, it has been moved from its original site to a city park and is no longer privately owned.

The Stage Stop “is a very authentic building and it has the most visibility of any of the other historic structures,” Kyle said. “It’s one of the few buildings left that lends a sense of ties to the past and history.”

Indeed, stories from the hotel’s past keep cropping up, supplied by local residents who have heard the Smith clan is receptive to occasional visitors.

Mildred Mitchell, 86, remembers walking past the hotel on her way to church as a schoolgirl in 1918. One day, she said, she and a group of other girls were startled by the sight of a male boarder disrobing in one of the rooms, apparently unaware that he had forgotten to pull down the blinds. “The girls all started screaming,” she said, the memory still vivid after 75 years. “We didn’t see very many scenes like that.”

And Charles West, 66, recalled that his parents met there in 1912 while his father lived in the hotel and his mother was a teacher at the old Grand Avenue school. “They met because it was the only place in town where you could eat,” he says. “I always wanted to go and see it, but didn’t until a month ago. I kind of thought it would be bigger.”

On occasion, it seems, “ghosts” from the past linger today. One recent visitor said she had difficulty persuading her smalldaughter to leave the house because the girl kept insisting on staying with a “man” she had befriended in the living room. The “man” was visible only to the girl. Yet the experience wasn’t troubling, the mother recalled. “At least he was friendly,” she said.

Friendly, in fact, is the way it usually is at the old Stage Stop Hotel these days, especially during porch parties like the one on Memorial Day. While adults barbecued hamburgers and hot dogs and kids flew toy airplanes, a few guests watched dreamily as a real airplane--flown by a skywriter far overhead--slowly spun out the words “Marry me, Mel” in the clouds.

“I wonder what Mel said?” one guest wondered aloud.

As always, of course, there was the continuous waving to the almost endless flow of traffic whooshing down Beach Boulevard en route to the sea.

A surprising number of drivers slowed down to wave back.

“Everyone in Buena Park knows about this house,” one occupant beamed. “It’s like living in a great big antique.”