Saving Garden Grove’s Past for the Future : Historical Society Needs New Blood--and Muscle--to Preserve the City’s Heritage

For more than 25 years, members of the Garden Grove Historical Society have labored to save some of the city’s oldest homes from demolition. Now some of that work is in peril from the ravages of rain and hot sun, which have worsened the condition of about half the 15 significant buildings that the society has moved to a small park on Euclid Avenue since 1966.

The work is being done by volunteers, and part of the problem is a familiar one: money. Fred Coles, the group’s founder says: “We can’t go down to the lumber company with a MasterCharge.” The group does raise money through book and craft sales, recycling and a $2 admission charge.

But a more vexing problem is the advancing age of the volunteer labor pool.

The society has 240 members, but Coles estimates that the group has only a dozen or so people who are capable of doing the heavy work needed for restoration.

It seems obvious that short of some city help, which would be nice but should not be banked on in these tight fiscal times, the society has got to get some help from some of the younger people in town.

In stating the mission of the society, Coles noted that: “Our aim is to be able to save a little bit of history so that [younger generations] will know what the village of [Garden Grove] was like.”

Clearly, if history is not to be lost to future generations, some of the next group of residents will have to pick up the work.

Southern California has so much that is not even a generation old, and the reminders of the past are worth preserving for the present and for the future. Somebody is going to have to jump in and pick up this work so that the past is not lost in the ever-changing present.

Orange County will be a little poorer in the end if, having made the effort to assemble and preserve a piece of the city’s history, these efforts are lost to the ravages of time through inattention.