Fresh PRESERVES

It’s been decades since the curvy, long-handled pumps from Charles Vermeulen’s farm burped air and gushed water, or since the horse-drawn plows turned over soil.

The wooden spokes on the wagon wheels probably couldn’t hold up a loaded cart and the 1915 Fordson tractor hasn’t belched smoke even in Vermeulen’s long, deep memory of farming in Orange County.

But these old tools and oddball gadgets, each one in its own way a wizard’s wand that enabled Orange County farmers to turn land and water into food for a sprouting state, have found a retirement home in, of all places, a San Juan Capistrano shopping center. And soon, these artifacts may be among the only physical reminders of the county’s agricultural legacy.

“A lot of this is nothing much at all--a bunch of old wrenches and bells and horse tools,” said their modest patron, Vermeulen, 83, the owner of Vermeulen’s Center and Ranch, a shopping center built on a portion of his former farm property here in the land of the swallows. “A lot of it wouldn’t mean anything to a lot of people.”

But here it is, more than 2,000 pieces of equipment, tools, wheels, gears and handle-less shovels and rakes, pails and buckets and one-cylinder engines, all painted in bright enamel, mounted and displayed at the center on Del Obispo north of Camino Del Avion, which used to house a produce stand.

Orange County still has farms where crops including nursery shrubs, cut flowers, strawberries, tomatoes and avocados (but very few oranges these days) are grown. However, their numbers and acreage shrink yearly.

Except for the nurseries that provide landscaping for the new housing tracts, farming may one day disappear altogether, some lament.

As recently as 1982, Orange County had more than 165,000 acres in farms, according to the U.S. Census of Agriculture. By the early 1990s, the figure had dwindled to 60,740 acres.

County figures show that by 1996, about 41,300 acres were harvested--some of the land bearing more than one crop, so the amount of acreage farmed actually may be less. And another land-gulping housing boom is underway.

As farming drifts steadily and permanently into the past, a museum of farm tools and equipment is a strong draw. There’s no admission, no gates--all explorers need to do is pull into the shopping center and park. The Vermeulen museum is all around you, in front of the Farm to Market store, beside the Armstrong Garden Center, the shops and offices housed by the center.

Other projects are underway around Orange County to preserve and display farming history, including one at the Irvine Historical Museum.

“It’s important for kids to know what was here before their house was here,” said Gail Daniels, executive director of the Irvine Historical Museum. “If we don’t know our history, how can we learn for the future?”

A former tenant farmer on the massive Irvine Ranch, Vermeulen sold off the family’s heavy equipment, but kept many of his tractors, wagons, blacksmith tools and other implements. And, as local farms and orchards are converted into houses, friends and acquaintances bring him more.

“A lot of people call me up and say. ‘I’ve got a piece of junk here.’ But we might think it’s interesting and we clean it up and paint it and put it out,” Vermeulen said.

Many tourists make a special trip after visiting the famed Mission San Juan Capistrano a few miles away, and shopping center customers linger for a few minutes to look.

“We get a lot of out-of-towners who stop by to look,” said Steve Steinfield, director of operations of the Farm to Market stores, who said visitors have been “amazed.”

“It’s nice to come out and see a little bit of Americana.”

Back when most of the county was cropland, Charles Vermeulen was one of seven children born to parents who in 1918 leased a large parcel from the Irvine Co. to grow fruit and vegetables.

As a boy, Vermeulen developed an admiration for the stern and successful James Irvine Jr., who inherited more than 100,000 acres of the land and leased it to tenant farmers.

“When we started farming, they loaned you the money and you paid them back at the end of the year,” Vermeulen said. “Irvine was a great man. He liked to see you work, but they’d help you with money and all.”

In 1937, Vermeulen and a brother traded 10 large farm horses for their first tractor. In ensuing years, they bought more tractors and more equipment, eventually acquiring their own land here and elsewhere in the county while they continued to farm for Irvine. Vermeulen’s wife, Irene, also came from an Orange County farming family.

“We became good mechanics. Good blacksmiths. Welders, everything,” he said. “We did all our own work.

Along the way came the tractors, the equipment and the “junk.” Vermeulen doesn’t know exactly why he began putting it on display, saying that it began with just a few items, then grew.

“I’ve done a lot of traveling,” he said. “Between my wife and I and my two daughters, we’ve probably been to 65 or 70 countries. I always like to go to areas in those countries where there was farming, and see the old farms.”

Neatly spread over several acres at his Del Obispo Avenue shopping center are the items that could be found on an Orange County farm--though not necessarily the way one might find them.

Carts and hay wagons have been turned into display cases, and tools and appliances are bolted to them, not necessarily in any order or in any form they may have been found while still on the farm. All brightly painted in reds, greens, yellows, oranges and blues, they probably didn’t look so colorful in their more useful days, either.

In one area of the parking lot is a complete forge, the old coal grate used to heat steel and dozens of tools and tongs that bent and pounded it into hooks and horseshoes.

There are grease guns once used to keep tractors chugging from row to row, fertilizer spreaders, drill presses, clamps, door springs.

Vermeulen collected and connected a farm’s worth of irrigation valves--on one display a series of 102 valves, and on another, 118.

And then, lining Del Obispo, are the tractors, eight just along the street, made by Farmall, John Deere, International Harvester and Oliver.

Some of the items have little or no connection to farming. A steam-roller; an old electric coffee maker; one of Irene’s cast-off portable vacuum cleaners.

“I told her I’d find a place for it,” Vermeulen said, shrugging.

But even if everything isn’t restored to vintage condition, Vermeulen’s museum is a place to see the tools of the trade that once defined Orange County.

Says Vermeulen: “Maybe somebody someday will be glad that somebody saved some of this stuff, so they can see it.”