Enduring Relic of Simpler Era

It’s easy to miss the Earth-N-Ware shop in Orange.

Coming west from Shaffer Street, there’s a large strip mall, fancy Indian restaurant and Pep Boys store. Then the tiny red farmhouse comes into view.

“They call it the old red barn,” Jerry Newton says of the rickety wooden building housing his unusual business, a smoke and pottery shop that operates under the slogan “Our Cigarettes Really Are Cheaper.”

In fact, it is a small piece of Orange County history inadvertently preserved among the modern edifices of Katella Avenue. Somehow, amid the street’s changing face, this little bit of the past has managed to remain the same.

Newton isn’t sure just when the building was constructed. Neither is Jack McGee, the city’s director of community development, nor is a spokeswoman for the Orange Community Historical Society.

What the storekeeper has managed to glean from his customers since opening shop here in 1991, however, is quite enough to intrigue.

The building--which is at least 75 years old--began life as a two-bedroom farmhouse amid a 60-acre grove of orange trees when Katella Avenue was an unpaved, two-lane road. About 25 years ago, Newton says, it ceased being used as a residence to make way for a string of businesses that have included a yarn store, furniture shop and sign company.

Eight years ago Newton, 50, opened a pottery shop there. The pots were soon augmented by candy, lottery tickets, cigarettes, cigars, chewing tobacco and pipe stuffings--all of which now constitutes 90% of his business.

He also offers a little something extra along with everything a smoking pottery lover could possibly want: a homey “country store” atmosphere reminiscent of old Orange County and served up in a house, complete with living room fireplace and kitchen sink that probably hasn’t seen a complete paint job since 1915.

“It really stands out,” Newton says of the old tongue-and-groove walled shop he bought for $250,000 in 1997. “There’s nothing else like it around.”

Part of the intrigue is the kind of attention the place gets. Three years ago, Newton says, a man walked in and started looking around with what appeared to be an unusual amount of familiarity. He turned out to be a grandson of the original owners and remembered visiting there as a child.

“He said some of the paint looked like it was his grandfather’s,” Newton recalled. “He told me that when he was a kid, there was nothing here but the house.”

Today that same stretch is made up of the high-priced real estate that makes it one of the county’s busiest commercial districts.

More recently another denizen of old Orange County dropped into Newton’s smoke shop. Betty Schram, 67, remembered living there with her parents in 1937 at about age 5. “It was a cute little house,” said Schram, who moved to Joshua Tree 20 years ago, “and it was exactly as it is now--nothing has changed.”

Nothing, that is, unless you count the dense residential housing and thriving businesses where once there were citrus groves.

“I have very fond memories of that place,” Schram recalled. “It was all orange groves around us. Out in back where the parking lot is now, we had cows and chickens and a horse and some goats. My dad had milk cows and we sold milk--it was like a little farm.”

Traces of that life can still be seen in the farmhouse-turned-smoke shop. In the tiny room that once served as the kitchen, rows of ceramic bowls now line the kitchen sink resting on the tiles next to the built-in ironing board. A large working fireplace still graces what once was the living room. The tiny bathroom remains intact, but it’s now used for storage. And attached to the house is a shed about the size of a tractor.

Adrienne Gladson, immediate past president of the Orange Community Historical Society, says that the area around Katella was once dotted by farmhouses like this.

“We think that the city boundaries probably didn’t extend that far,” she said, “but there had to have been dozens of farmhouses that would have been in the outskirts of town, or out in the ‘boonies.’ ”

It hardly seems like the boondocks now, as customers constantly flow in and out of the parking lot. Some mornings, old-timers gather here to socialize and reminisce. Yet even younger customers seem inextricably drawn to this overlooked ripple in time.

“I like the rustic atmosphere,” said Steve Boeltz, 33, a regular customer. “It’s an old family atmosphere, like a bit of old Orange County.”

J.R. Brannon, 49, says he appreciates the nostalgia the smoke shop evokes.

“It reminds you of the old days,” he says. “They greet you with a handshake.”

History, however, can be an abstract concept to those firmly planted in the present, especially along a corridor like Katella that seems to sweep the past away. Joel Agranowitz, 42, comes here regularly to buy cigarettes and Lotto tickets. Has he ever noticed the building’s quaintness?

“Not really,” he says. Has he ever wondered about its past? No.

What exactly, then, does this cabinet maker from Orange most appreciate about the place?

Well, he said after a few seconds’ pause, there is one thing. “Their cigarettes really are cheaper.”