O.C.’s ‘Treasure Chest’ of History

It’s easy to miss the entrance to Heritage Hill Historical Park.

It is tucked at the far end of a Lake Forest strip mall, past the bagel shop, the hardware store, the clothing boutique and the fitness clinic. Past all of these familiar fixtures of modern life and beyond a black iron gate is a time machine to Orange County’s history.

“It’s the best-kept secret we have,” docent Lee Hobbs said of the county’s first historical park. “The place is a treasure chest.”

In the 1860s, the present-day park was part of Rancho Canada de los Alisos, 10,688-acres granted by the local Mexican governor to Spanish aristocrat Don Jose Serrano.

On this land, much of which comprises what is now the city of Lake Forest, the wealthy cattle rancher built five adobe homes. Only one remains, the 1863 Serrano Adobe, centerpiece of the four-acre Heritage Park.

“It’s the reason the park is here,” said Hobbs, 67, former president of the local historical society and member of Amigos de Colina -- Friends of the Hill -- a volunteer docent group. The Serrano Adobe is the oldest surviving house in Saddleback Valley, she said, and one of the county’s best preserved adobes.

“They knew they couldn’t move it,” she said. So instead, other structures important to the town’s history were moved there to a well-fenced knoll adjacent to the strip mall.

Today, in addition to the adobe, fully restored and filled with relics of its era, the park is home to three historical buildings that give a sense of local life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Lake Forest was called El Toro until its incorporation in 1991. So there is the 1890 El Toro Grammar School, a one-room school built on the west corner of 1st Street and Olive Avenue. There is St. George’s Episcopal Mission church, constructed a year later to serve “gentlemen fruit farmers” recruited from England. And there is the 1908 Bennett Ranch House, home to one of the valley’s earliest and most prominent orange-growing families.

All three structures, Hobbs said, were moved to the park about 1975 when local leaders realized that they “were going to lose all this history” if they didn’t do something to preserve it.

What they did was create a glimpse into a small rural town of 100 years ago.

On the wall of the schoolhouse, where grades one through eight were taught, hangs a list of rules for teachers, including the news that “men ... may take an evening each week for courting purposes, or two evenings a week if they attend Church regularly,” while “women teachers who marry or engage in unseemly conduct will be dismissed.”

The rules also warn that “any teacher who smokes, uses liquor in any form, frequents pool or public halls or gets shaved in a barber shop will give good reason to suspect his worth.”

Visitors to St. George’s church -- resembling a big white barn -- can see rows of wooden chairs and an original baptismal font topped by a large seashell.

The Bennett Ranch House has a variety of artifacts, including one of the first electric refrigerators, faded family portraits and children’s rooms containing wooden rocking horses and toy metal trains.

“Almost everyone alive today has someone in their family who may have lived in a house like this,” said Diane Wollenberg, a ranger who works at the park. “They all say, ‘I remember when it was like this,’ or, ‘My great-grandmother’s home was like this.’ They want to touch the Victrola [record player] because they’ve seen one before.”

The park, on Serrano Road, is open Wednesdays through Sundays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.; admission is free.

Docent-led tours start at 2 p.m., with extra 11 a.m. showings on the weekends.

Wollenberg estimated that as many as 50 people visit the park each day, plus hundreds of schoolchildren and teachers on field trips. Thousands more see the park while attending the 30 or so weddings the park hosts each year.

Armando Madrid, 49, of East Los Angeles examined the old buildings for the first time during a recent rehearsal for his sister’s nuptials.

“I love historic places,” he said. “I love seeing the history of California.”

For Hobbs, it’s all part of an essential mission.

“This is our history, and if you don’t preserve your history, what else have you got to preserve?” she said.