At Home With History : Publishing: A Santa Ana resident has written a book about the city’s architectural and civic past. She not only writes about it, she lives with it in the French Park district.

Diann Marsh lives in the past.

Her 1923 General Electric refrigerator is the kind with a round compressor on top and foot pegs on the bottom. The phonograph, circa 1900, still belts out marching tunes, although it needs a new needle. And Marsh purchased her home in the city’s historic French Park district for $10 in 1986 (however, it cost $25,000 to move the dwelling five blocks to its current location).

“I feel like people should be remembered,” said Marsh, 59, the city’s unofficial historian and a grandmother of eight, “and what we are today is a lot of the product of what’s happened in the past.”

Over the last 12 years, Marsh has earned a living writing proposals to have more than 100 buildings throughout Orange County and beyond placed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Now she has authored what county history buffs say is the city’s most complete history to date, a coffee table-style book titled “Santa Ana . . . An Illustrated History.”

“Santa Ana’s history has been hidden under a bushel all this time,” said Jim Sleeper, an authority on Orange County history who wrote an introduction to Marsh’s book. Sleeper argued that Santa Ana traditionally has been viewed as the county seat rather than a city with its own story to tell.

Marsh’s book is chock-full of details about Santa Ana residents before, and after, William Spurgeon hired an architect to lay out the first town site on Dec. 13, 1870.

Starting with Native Americans, who moved here for the fresh water and “the pleasant countryside,” the book moves on to the mission period, which began in 1796 and lasted almost 100 years.

Marsh tells how part of Rancho Santiago de Santa Ana, which includes present-day Santa Ana and many surrounding cities, was purchased for $6,000 cash, 100 heifers, 50 steers and 50 fillies in 1854.

She abruptly ends her book in the 1940s, “because I had already written too much.”

One of the book’s final vignettes covers “one of the county’s most sensational murder trials.”

After a trial that attracted national attention in the late 1940s, heiress Beulah Overell, 18, and fiance George (Bud) Gollum, 21, were found not guilty of murdering Overell’s parents by blowing up their yacht while it was moored in Newport Harbor.

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The presumed motive, Marsh said, was that the parents disliked their daughter’s fiance. And money might have figured into the equation.

Sleeper noted that the book is heavy on architectural history, such as a photo spread on late 19th-Century churches. But he added, “Certainly, those things do ring a bell with old-timers.”

Charles Parks, publisher of Encinitas-based Heritage Publishing, approached the board of the Santa Ana Historical Preservation Society three years ago with the idea of publishing a book on the city’s history. Marsh, then the board’s only professional historian, signed up for the job. Her husband Robert became the photo editor.

Marsh researched her book using newspaper clippings, documents written by residents in the 1920s and 1930s, and other books. She has also inspected some of the buildings firsthand.

She said the buildings “talk to me,” and added she is drawn to the everyday things that went on in historic homes, such as children playing.

The oversize, hardcover book is 246 pages, but the number of pages written by Marsh is only about 157. The last chapter is reserved for comments from current City Council members and local activists promoting civic pride.

And the final pages, in what Parks said is a common twist, are reserved for paid profiles of local companies and organizations, which helped underwrite the book.

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The volume, which Parks said can be found in most Santa Ana bookstores and museums, sells for $29.95. He said 2,500 of 3,000 copies have already been sold. Of the proceeds, $10,000 will go to the Santa Ana Historical Preservation Society.

Marsh will sign copies of her book today in the Santa Ana History Room of the city’s main library.

Marsh said she became interested in historical preservation in the late 1970s, when she lived in Anaheim and met the people whose homes and businesses were threatened by a proposed strip mall.

“I met these old people who didn’t want to be thrown out of their houses . . . and businessmen who didn’t want to leave,” she recalled.

But Marsh only ended up annoying downtown redevelopment officials, who said she waited too long before trying to preserve more than 70 turn-of-the-century homes.

“We tried to save downtown Anaheim,” Marsh said, but added, “If you’ve ever seen it, we lost. They tore it all down.”

Not surprisingly, bits and pieces of those old buildings have found their way into Marsh’s back yard, where they are now used for decoration. Others were fitted together and made into planters.

“It was like finding Rome, or Tutankhamen’s tomb,” Marsh said of the building blocks and columns decorated with scrolls and angels’ heads. “It was really awesome.”

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History Lesson A profile of Diana Marsh, a Santa Ana resident who turned her love of local history into acoffee table book: Agel: 59 Home: Historic French Park district, Santa Ana Personal: Married, seven children, eight grandchildren Work: Past 12 years spent writing proposals to get more than 100 buildings in Orange and other counties placed on National Register of Historic Places Book: “Santa Ana. . .An Illustrated History.” Attitude: “I feel like people should be remembered. . . and what we are today is a lot of the product of what’s happened in the past.” Source: Times reports