SAN FERNANDO : Historic Adobe Gets a Festive Christmas Look

Eighty-six-year-old curator Carolyn Riggs tosses down a bag of handpicked English holly, edges aside a weighty wooden table and slowly starts scrubbing the pine floorboards of a house 24 years older than she is.

Christmas cleaning is thankless work, Riggs admits--thankless, that is, until she thinks of the schoolchildren who will make San Fernando’s little-known restored Lopez Adobe an educational stop during the holiday season.

“It’ll be a Victorian Christmas,” said Riggs, waving her hands around at the thick adobe walls and the gas-fired stone hearth in the oldest home in San Fernando. “The only thing we don’t do is put a real tree in, because of the fire hazard.”

The ornate wood balcony and stucco facade of the adobe stand out as a Mexican-American gem tucked amid strip stores and modern homes near Maclay Avenue and Pico Street in the center of town.

Completed in 1883, the adobe was the second home for Catalina and Geronimo Lopez, who had founded a stagecoach stop called Lopez Station in what is now Granada Hills. The house is a fusion of North American Colonial style and distinctly Mexican adobe construction. Among the city’s first residents, the couple reared 13 children in the home, and one daughter lived there until 1961.

Inside, the adobe brims with turn-of-the-century furniture, books, clothing and personal effects from the family and other Valley donors--including a mourning dress worn to the funeral of President Abraham Lincoln, and a 1915 wedding dress made in the Philippines out of pineapple fiber, for an unnamed 4-foot-10-inch bride.

Volunteers such as Riggs hope that the holiday decorations will draw more visitors to the home, which is somewhat forgotten compared to the Pico Adobe and Mission San Fernando in Mission Hills. Just 25 people stopped by to visit in November, for example.

“Most of the people who come through say, ‘You know, we’ve been here 20 years and it’s the first time I’ve been through,’ ” Riggs said. “When it’s right in your back yard, you say you’ll go tomorrow or some other day.”

The house is open Wednesdays and Saturdays from 11 a.m to 3 p.m., and Sundays from 1 to 4 p.m. Admission is free.