Where Firewood’s for Sale, History’s on View

From Interstate 5 in San Juan Capistrano, it’s hard to miss Rosenbaum Ranch: Look for the 25-foot-high pile of wood.

For more than three decades, Mel Rosenbaum, 81, has tended what’s left of his family’s historic ranch, which once stretched 700 acres from what is now Camino Capistrano through San Juan Capistrano and Rancho Santa Margarita.

On just over 6 acres on Trabuco Creek Road, Rosenbaum runs a small citrus grove, an impromptu museum and one of the region’s few year-round firewood businesses.

The ranch sells $10 baskets the size of shopping carts that feed Orange County’s fireplaces, campfires and beach bonfires, and also sells the wood in bigger quantities.

But there’s more at the ranch than the smell of fresh-cut eucalyptus, pine, oak, orange and almond wood.

Inside a clapboard farmhouse that doubles as the office, Rosenbaum and his wife, Hazel, have thrown together a random collection of old items that gives glimpses of life in rural Southern California before subdivisions blanketed the landscape.

Beside the log-filled shopping carts are old wooden cabinets. A row of crates that were used to ship fruit during the 1930s lie in one corner near dusty soda bottles, a broken oil lamp and a red tin of Barnum & Bailey Animal Crackers. Long orange picking bags made of nylon hang on hooks, and a hodgepodge of old farm tools decorate the walls.

Hazel Rosenbaum said she set the antiques out years ago hoping to sell a few. “But the wood took over,” she said.

From time to time, customers do offer to buy things other than wood -- especially the old Pepsi, Coke and 7-Up bottles. People have even made offers for Johnny, a handsome Siamese cat who keeps the rodents away.

Mel Rosenbaum always turns down the offers -- for the cat because Johnny is family, and for the bottles because they’ve become a familiar feature of the place.

“Otherwise, what would people look at?” said Rosenbaum, waving a hand at the glassware. “I tell them they’re just for decoration.”

Rosenbaum picked up most of the collectibles and cabinets at auctions and estate sales, he said. Other items, such as the farm tools, are relics from his family’s cattle ranching days.

Among the more curious items on the wall is what looks like pliers with ball bearings instead of pinchers at the tips -- a tool used by his grandfather to lead unruly bulls by their nostrils, Rosenbaum explained.

“There’s a lot of cool stuff here,” said Bill Ouderkirk, 48, Rosenbaum’s only full-time employee. “I worked for free for a long time just so I could hang out here.”

Rosenbaum’s family registered the first cattle brand in Orange County in 1890, and later farmed citrus groves, tomatoes, barley and lima beans.

Rosenbaum still grows oranges, even though the revenue from selling the fruit has barely covered the cost of watering the trees since the 1970s.

That’s when Orange County’s building boom began to take shape. Developers hired him to chop down eucalyptus and orange groves to make way for buildings. He started selling the logs and soon found himself in a new business.

These days, Rosenbaum doesn’t split his own wood. Instead, most of his stock is delivered ready-to-sell by the truckload from Central California. He hires seasonal workers to chop the wood, and Ouderkirk drives the delivery trucks.

Yet the happy-go-lucky octogenarian isn’t about to retire.

“I used to work like a son of a gun. I used to carry everything,” he said with a chuckle.

Rosenbaum still works six days a week managing the place. His 13-year-old dog Chili ambles alongside wherever he goes.

He also tends to about 50 orange trees, selling fruit boxes to local restaurants, and he stocks chocolate, sodas and candy for the neighborhood kids to buy.

Business is good, he said, and with the rising cost of natural gas people may turn to their fireplaces rather than the thermostat this winter. He said he might sell out of firewood by January.

Rosenbaum said he had thought about closing up shop, but worried about his customers.

“I could close this ... but our poor customers. What are they going to do for firewood?”

Those customers include the pair of local pizza restaurants that have been buying wood from Rosenbaum for 25 years to heat their ovens.

Over time, much of the Rosenbaum Ranch was sold to developers. To this day, Rosenbaum said, he gets at least one letter a week from people interested in buying the ranch. But Rosenbaum is holding onto the 6 1/4 acres that are left. He said he once turned down a $6-million offer for the ranch. He doesn’t need the money, he said. And there are his four children to consider, he said.

“The kids would throw a fit” if the ranch were sold, Rosenbaum said. “They want it for the heritage.”