Young Towns, Rich History

The yellowed tomes of civilization’s history may say little about the vernal cities popping up around Southern California. Our nation’s diarists may have overlooked the subdivisions of south Orange County.

But if it seems at first blush that some towns in Orange County haven’t been around long enough to have any history, think again.

“We’re new, but our history’s rich,” said Judy Henderson, a volunteer at the Dana Point Historical Museum, soon be the newest of a long roster of small museums and historical collections around Orange County when it holds its grand opening Nov. 14.

An outsider may think that many of these cities are a bit light in the longevity department. In Dana Point, circa 1989, for instance, there are no legends of midnight rides by Paul Revere, no famous declaration signings, no Civil War cannon balls embedded in the walls of the surf shops.

But there are other episodes and events that conjure up images of times of old, of sailing ships and Indian trails, of hardships and heroes. Across Orange County, devotees brim with the ambition to uncover, display and ponder their pasts.

In fact, the Orange County Historical Commission counts 90 organizations devoted to history, heritage and preservation. They operate or help run more than 20 museums, at least 26 historical homes and dozens of special collections, reading rooms and other facilities.

For a county that was little more than fruit trees 50 years ago, where does all this “history” come from?

From the land, the sea, the shore, the farm fields. Everywhere imaginable. And, sometimes, you have to use a little imagination, as historian Doris Walker wrote, to see that a town like “Dana Point, now a modern American city, still has a romantic ghost.”

“I think people want to have a place to at least visit the past,” said author and historian Joe Osterman, a director of the Saddleback Area Historical Society. “Most of us are not willing to hurl ourselves in front of the bulldozers to stop the development and modernization, but we have a lot of people who would like to see what it used to be like.”

The romance of the past reaches back before the days of suburbia, when the countryside was nothing but forest and farmland, interspersed with villages and rural settlements, streams traversed by trappers and hills scoured by planters. It was that way across America, of course, before sprawling cities began paving over lands, paving over their mystique and their mythology. Just between 1952 and 1992, about 2,500 American cities were created.

Recalling those earlier times, the Saddleback historical group helps maintain and guide tours at the 19th-century adobe house and a one-room school building at Heritage Hill Historical Park. The group hopes to one day expand its reading room into a full-fledged museum.

“We’re trying to perpetuate a way of life that used to be, so people can visualize and either wish they were there, or else thank their lucky stars that they’re not,” Osterman said.

Farther south, the Heritage of San Clemente, a year-old storefront and museum on El Camino Real run by the nonprofit Heritage of San Clemente Foundation, sells gifts and posters and features exhibits on surfing, the old Western White House of Richard Nixon and late war hero Col. Aaron Bank, native son and acclaimed “Father of the Green Berets.”

But more than statically maintaining an inventory of the past, the San Clemente foundation also plunges into the battles of the present, over uses of historic buildings such as the town’s famous Casa Romantica and other issues.

“We’re fighting that one tooth and nail,” said foundation founder G. Wayne Eggleston, now its executive director.

These expanding reading rooms and new museums face an uphill battle at a time when even established museums are struggling to raise money.

“A lot of the time, they may be given a collection or space for a collection, but have no way to maintain the collection or upgrade the space,” said Teri Knoll, executive director of the California Assn. of Museums.

Of an estimated 2,000 museums in California, about 70% are related to history, and most are small or mid-size collections operated by volunteers with the assistance of, at most, a single employee, Knoll said.

Yet, historical museums and collections tend to attract enthusiastic volunteers and visitors who spend hours combing through old articles and photos.

In San Clemente, about 75 people a day come through, Eggleston said.

As a result, the pressure is on officials and businesses to support the small, local museums as a key component of an area’s “cultural industry,” Knoll said.

“They’re recognized by the tourism industry as being valuable tourist sites” along with theaters, restaurants and other amenities, Knoll said.

In Dana Point, the historical society had been leasing a room at the city offices for $1 a year, said Bob Moore, a director and spokesman for the society. But City Council members gave the society the boot earlier this year when an insurance company offered to pay a market rent on the space.

Developer Dave Busk scoured the city for space, coming up with a former karate studio in a shopping center at Blue Lantern and Pacific Coast Highway. Businesses pitched in to refurbish the storefront, and grants and support from local and regional companies, including the Atlantic Richfield Co., will get the museum through its debut year.

After that, nobody knows, volunteers said.

“We’re not really a fund-raising organization, we’re a historical society. But we’re getting to the point where we have to raise money, and it’s hard,” said Judy Henderson, the treasurer.

The Dana Point/Capistrano Beach collection features gifts and old photo reprints for sale, along with a commemorative afghan featuring well-known local sites and events dating from the first visit by East Coast seaman Richard Henry Dana on his ship, the Pilgrim.

Prominent in the museum is the legend of the hide “droghers,” the muscular sailors who flung heavy cowhides harvested in mid-1800s San Juan Capistrano off the Dana Point cliffs to ships waiting below. In fact, a rendering of one such drogher, a word used for the shuttling of goods, is the society’s logo.

Then there are the photographs from the early 1920s, when crews graded the “Roosevelt Coast Highway” through south Orange County and famed “Hollywoodland” developer S.H. Woodruff proposed plat maps for the seaside resort, only to have the project collapse in the stock market debacle of 1929. One such photograph shows a group of prospective buyers boarding a bus to visit the Orange County town, the original “Hollywoodland” sign in the hills above them.

“These scenes really get to people,” said Beverly Sels, president of the society. “They love to see the way it was, before we all came.”