Sunset on O.C. Ranch Known for Battles

This is a tale of the Orange County that once was a place where people came for space and freedom and discovered the world was rushing in right behind them. It is also about love, loss, and, above all, Jeanne Porter and her late husband, Sam.

They, or rather Jeanne, represents the last of a kind: Possessor of one of the few privately owned ranches left in south Orange County. When they moved there 22 years ago, the Porters could see one light in the distance. Today, Mission Viejo has grown right up to the ranch gate. The time is near, Jeanne reckons, when she must leave her sunsets and wildflowers, partly because of a developer’s lawsuit over her property and partly because everything has changed around her.

But we’re talking about more than the likely final chapter in one of Orange County’s most eccentric slices of history--for it was in Porterville where Sam and Jeanne made frequent headlines in the mid-1980s, fighting county officials and almost everybody else to let poor people live on their land in shacks and trailers.

“Sam used to call this the last outpost of civilization,” said Jeanne. And he was right.

A Man Hard as Nails but With a Soft Spot

Atop the hill where dusk’s light turns the long grass into fields of tarnished gold lie the ashes of Sam Porter, a maddeningly stubborn, proud tower of a man, argumentative and often wrong. A Westerner filled with bombast, and a dash of softness, who did it his way or no way.

Down below is the darkly wooded house he built with Jeanne, long ago when a couple could still find land, even in a place like Orange County, and live in leaf-rustling silence with animals, a creek, the fragrance of sage and no sign of a city for miles.

“The whole canyon life was very rural, very old Orange County,” said the Porters’ longtime friend and attorney Greg Sanders. “That way of life is vanishing rapidly. Jeanne is one of the last of those who’ve enjoyed a pastoral lifestyle. It’s just not to be found anymore.”

As county Planning Director Tom Mathews put it, “Jeanne Porter is an anomaly. There are probably, shooting from the hip, 50 to 100 people who have that kind of acreage in the entire county.”

But she may not have her 233 acres for long. Two-and-a-half years ago, Sam left Jeanne a widow, with no will, piles of debt and the legal tug of war over the land, which touches the Cleveland National Forest.

“Death is inevitable, just as I know selling this place is inevitable,” Jeanne says. “I’ve become inured to the pain. I can find another beautiful place. [But] it won’t be the same.”

When she does leave, a colorful piece of Orange County’s past will go with her.

Jeanne takes a deep breath when she starts to tell of her first meeting with Sam. She was 23, he 43. Sam hailed from Ogden, Utah, came west to attend the University of Southern California in 1946 and ended up in Orange County in the early 1950s.

The cement contractor who came one day to her mother’s house on a job was different from other men.

It wasn’t just that he was lean, 6 feet 4, with piercing green eyes and a deep voice. Or that he wore jeans and a blue work shirt in the era of polyester and puka shell necklaces. Or even the way he removed his fleece-lined jacket and dramatically tossed it aside. It was his commanding presence, his trademark single-mindedness.

“I instantly fell in love with him,” Jeanne said, “just his rugged nature.”

They married in 1974, exchanging silver buffalo wedding rings. As she recalled Sam explaining, “ ‘The buffalo is the only animal that will face a storm head on.’ That symbolized our marriage.”

They had a daughter, Suzie, who is now 25.

Three years later, they settled in the foothills and called their spread Trabuco Highlands. Life was hardly tranquil, not even in paradise, not with Sam.

He feuded with nearly everybody.

There was Sam with a shotgun, blocking the road to keep away litterers and off-roaders.

There was Sam, running unsuccessfully in 1988 for the county Board of Supervisors, whom he called “a bunch of overgrown toads who hop and croak whenever a developer waves his hand.” This, from the same man who once described himself as a “militant pro-growther.”

And, manifestly, there was Sam, allowing 80 low-income people, mostly Mexican workers, to live on his land, setting the stage for years of conflict with county code enforcement officials and others, namely the residents of the 645-home subdivision that had sprouted up just outside the ranch.

“The whole concept of Porterville started as an accident,” Jeanne said. “One day an old man who worked at the (nearby) nursery came and asked if he could live here if he helped out.”

That was 1981.

“Somehow, word got out,” she said. “Sam couldn’t turn anybody away.”

Sam, with Jeanne’s support, regarded their ranch as a sanctuary (Sam termed it his “Christian charitable obligation”). Some extolled the humanitarian effort. Others called it a slum encampment and pointed out that Sam charged rent, although the sums were nominal.

‘El Patron’ Strikes Court Settlement

Over the years of rancor, Sam at one time or another likened himself to Jim Bowie at the Alamo, Confederate immortal Stonewall Jackson, and King Leonidas martyred at the battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C.

Porterville, where residents called Sam “El Patron,” was finally dismantled in the mid-1990s and the people shuffled out, leaving behind rusty vehicles and tumbledown quarters.

A court agreement in 1992 had given the subdivision’s homeowner association the right to build a gate separating the tract from the ranch. Soon after the gate went in, Sam had a stroke that partially paralyzed him. Two years later, he died of a brain embolism after falling and breaking his hip. He was 68.

To the end, Sam was true to character.

He left no will. “Sam was convinced he’d never die,” Jeanne said. “We had talked about it, but Sam was not a man to take advice willingly.”

While Sam could be hard to like, there was another side. “What do you say about a fellow,” asked Dave Niederhaus, who has a cabin two miles away in Holy Jim Canyon, “who gets a tractor, drives five miles up the canyon and installs a beautiful cross on a church?”

Sam left more than a name and a controversial legacy. Jeanne is swamped with back taxes, legal bills and more. A residential developer, Sebastian Rucci, filed a lawsuit maintaining that before Sam died he had signed an agreement to sell Rucci the property for $1.2 million.

Rucci attorney John Park Yasuda says Sam’s estate is fighting to escape the agreement because land values have shot up and Sam’s family wants to sell to another developer for more money.

“We have an enforceable contract,” Yasuda said. If Jeanne wins the suit, which goes to trial in July, “she could come out very wealthy,” Yasuda said.

Jeanne’s side argues the agreement is void, although there is no dispute that Sam intended to sell the ranch.

Even if she prevails, Jeanne said, any profit from selling the property would go to pay off the steep debts with anything remaining to be divided among Sam’s heirs. He left six children, one with Jeanne and five by a previous marriage. She denies she’s holding out for more cash.

Jeanne, 50, who has worked for 20 years as a teacher and lately as a program director at nearby county-run Joplin Boy’s Ranch, said she expects to come away with little no matter what.

Rather than see the land turned into housing, Jeanne said she’s approached the Nature Conservancy to see if it would be interested in acquiring the ranch. Scott Ferguson, a senior project manager for the group, said, “She has been in contact with us, and I have been out to the property. The setting is incredible.” He said the question is whether the conservancy can find the money for the property.

Jeanne has always been reluctant to sell, feeling the land is sacred, revering its every scent and sound and nuance of the light.

“Jeanne is a thoughtful, very sensitive person,” said Niederhaus. “I’ve often found her walking in the hills, early morning, late at night, alone.”

Said longtime friend Sandy Sandling, “If you were to design a woman who cared about righteousness and goodness, nature and people, you’d describe Jeanne. She loves the land, but the horrible problems piled up. It’s like she’s carrying a ton of bricks on her shoulders. . . . It’s such a sad story.”

‘If Only It Could Be Like It Was’

Even now, although so much has happened, Jeanne savors this place where the Santa Ana winds shriek through the canyon, where boulders roll like a freight train along the rain-flushed creek, and the moon paints the oaks, sage and chaparral with a pale, creamy luminescence.

“Before sunset, it’s like gold is in the air,” she said. “It lights up everything in the most wonderful glow.”

As she walks the trails, she is accompanied by Brady, Rebel or Dink, her laid-back, almost shy dogs. One of the horses lopes up to lick an occasional visitor. The chickens, who apparently have their issues, suddenly raise a commotion.

And Sam was right about something. The ranch really is an outpost. Jeanne and county planners believe it’s the last privately owned property between eastern Orange County and Riverside County.

A throwback to an earlier time in Orange County, the Porter house is the antithesis of today’s architectural sameness.

Sam and Jeanne built it with concrete floors, faded red barn siding and wooden beams. It resembles a cowboy lodge with saddles, lariats and hats hanging inside. There’s also a hint of high funk and hippiedom in the carefully made clutter.

Electricity is provided by generator. There’s no microwave or blow dryer. For a long time there wasn’t even a television or hot running water.

“If only it could be like it was 20 years ago,” Jeanne said, knowing it never will be. “I’ll have to go out of state. I’ve got to find someplace remote; I’m just kind of a loner, I guess.”

Daughter Suzie isn’t ready to give in. She still hopes something will work out with the Nature Conservancy. “I want to take every chance we can to save it,” she said.

She has her mother’s sensitivity and her father’s directness. And no matter how it works out, Suzie, a recent graduate in environmental studies from Prescott College in Arizona, intends to remain in Orange County.

“I want to stay; this is where the kids are who need an education on why you can’t just pave over everything,” she said.

Her mother is more resigned and looks up at the hill where Sam’s remains are buried. She knows he’d understand that she has to leave him behind.

“This is where he had his biggest successes and failures in life,” Jeanne said. “He belongs here.”