Adobe Opens a Door to the Past

The make-believe town of Get-Up-An-Get-It was all abuzz Sunday during the Olivas Fiesta Ole.

Innocent Miss Molly sat wrongfully accused. The vigilantes gathered to run the town’s troublemakers and mountebanks out. A “no good claim jumper” seemed assured of being hanged.

Town population: several hundred children and adults who were in just for the day. Many of them seemed interested in one thing--getting their hands on nuggets of gold. Well, pyrite actually.

At the 17th annual western-themed festival at the adobe home of Don Raymundo Olivas, about 500 visitors got a peek at life 150 years ago. The event was a tour through a fictional town at the dawn of the Gold Rush and an example of the early years of ranchero life at the Olivas mansion.

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“This place is ordinarily calm, sedate, even monastic,” said Richard Senate, site manager at the city-run museum. “But when it was a working ranch, there were 21 children, 75 people working, 50 dogs, 200 horses, oxen, sheep, cattle. It was like a zoo . . . sort of like today.”

Visitors could participate in weaving spun wool into cloth, fashioning Mexican paper flowers and even opt for a little spot of laundry, rubbing their bright whites over a ribbed washboard, just as Don Raymundo’s servants must have done in the days when California was just becoming a state.

One of the county’s more powerful men in the mid-19th century, Olivas built what was then quite a symbol of wealth when Ventura’s population was pushing 500 people.

The mansion boasts two stories, a balcony and a shingled roof, and imported eucalyptus trees from Australia and roses from Peru. But the dwelling also has no bathroom and only three bedrooms for Olivas, his wife and his 21 children.

“This is a great opportunity to learn about the Ranchero period,” said Esther Dominguez, a museum docent from Oxnard. “The children ask, ‘Where did they sleep?’ Well, they slept in the hallway or in the courtyard.”

Meanwhile, a handful of Civil War-garbed “soldiers” fired cannons and costumed “townsfolk” gave a glimpse of old-time justice, sentencing a “low skunk” to a date with the rope. Miss Molly’s innocence ultimately remained unsullied, and the town’s rogues were rousted. A classical guitarist played, and Ballet Folklorico took to the courtyard with traditional Mexican dances.

For 12-year-old Tina Osier, the visit to the 19th century was all in a day’s work. She arrived in a ground-sweeping dress, her hair done up in a net, her typical Civil War reenactment look. But, she had never spun her own wool before, or used a loom to make tight-woven cloth.

Only at the adobe for 10 minutes, Tina had already learned all about quilting, she said.

The organizers were admittedly fudging some details: The Gold Rush was centered hundreds of miles north of Ventura and never really hit this area. But even now, Senate said, in the back country around Piru, rain sometimes makes the tiny glittering specks of gold visible.

But in the town of Get-Up-An-Get-It, those panning in sand-filled tubs Sunday only garnered nuggets of pyrite--pretty and sparkling, but not particularly valuable.

And it was probably the one time that you could find so many children willing to do such hard work.

“My 88-year-old great aunt said ‘If you had to do it, you wouldn’t think it was any fun,’ ” said Sarah Delgado, who was teaching children how to spin fleece into yarn on her own wheel. “But, for me, it is fun.”