Ranch Remains Home to Pioneer’s Descendant

Above the door of the clapboard farmhouse near Trabuco Creek, behind the stacks of firewood of eucalyptus, pine, ash and sycamore, the sign reads “Since 1868, Rosenbaum Ranch.”

The current proprietor is 72-year-old Mel Rosenbaum, a member of a pioneer family that is among the elite in centuries-old San Juan Capistrano.

But the Rosenbaums also share several slices of local history that, even here, are known by few.

As the story goes, Henry George Rosenbaum, the patriarch of the Rosenbaum clan, brought the old German tradition of Christmas trees to California in 1851, before he arrived in San Juan Capistrano.

Rosenbaum, a German immigrant who initially settled in San Francisco, sold the cut redwood trees on the streets of that city, said Jim Sleeper, a county historian.

“Henry George, when he got here, he lived by his wits,” said Sleeper, who noted that the Christmas tree story was first reported in an Alameda newspaper back in 1901.

Melvin, Henry George’s great-grandson, did not have the same success in more recent years.

“I tried Christmas trees once but it didn’t work too well,” he said.

Henry George Rosenbaum, who was one of the original owners of San Francisco’s Cliff House, became the county road superintendent in the late 1800s as well as a playwright. He was actually more of a socialite than a farmer, said Pamela Gibson, a San Juan Capistrano historian.

“He was a fascinating character and a close friend of Judge Richard Egan, part of that social set, which included Madame Helena Modjeska,” she said. Egan was a prominent farmer and land surveyor whose old downtown San Juan Capistrano home has been converted to a restaurant, while Modjeska was a Polish actress who is the namesake of Modjeska Canyon, where she lived.

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The Rosenbaums also hold the distinction of having registered the first cattle brand in Orange County in 1890, a year after the county was created.

These days, with no cattle left on the ranch, the old brand--an “OR” for Oscar Rosenbaum, Henry George’s son--is being used on another family member’s ranch in the Imperial Valley, said Melvin’s wife, Hazel.

Finally, Mel Rosenbaum represents a coupling of two of the county’s historic families. Mel’s father, Ed Rosenbaum, married Juanita Carrillo, whose family’s California history goes back to 1775 and the Spanish settlers led by Capt. Juan Bautista de Anza.

The Carrillos, who used to own 160-acre Rancho Carrillo east of San Juan Capistrano and whose old family adobe still stands in San Diego’s Old Town, have intermarried with the Yorbas and the Sepulvedas, two of California’s earliest ranching families, according to Merle Rosenbaum Cannady, Mel’s aunt.

“Mel can trace his ancestry back to the first [European] families to ever settle in California,” said Cannady, 88, who now lives in San Marcos.

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Today, Mel Rosenbaum tends to the remaining six acres of what was once the family’s 1,000-acre ranch, which had citrus groves, cattle and parcels of barley and lima beans.

The halcyon days of farming in the Capistrano Valley are nearly over, Rosenbaum said.

“It’s not economically feasible anymore,” he said. “Sure, I have orange and avocado and fruit trees, but there is no money in it. The water and taxes are too high to farm. It’s been kind of frozen out.”

He appears proud of his standing in California’s history but is not one to yearn for the “good old days.”

“I liked it in the old days, of course. I was raised here when there was nothing really here but orange orchards and cattle,” he said.

But people have to make way for progress, he said. “People used to worry about the influx of population, here and all over California. But people come in and bring in opportunity, and you really need to have that too,” he said.