The Valley Yesteryear : Floriza Dohs Husbands: San Fernando resident since 1900.

Descendants of the Valley’s first American owners and developers are relative newcomers in contrast to the long history of Floriza Husbands’ family in California. Even Gold Rush immigrants cannot lay claim to such a long history.

Husbands’ grandmother, Isabel Rodriquez, was born in Monterey in 1831, and her grandfather came from Spain in the 1840s.

Husbands, who was born in San Fernando in 1900 and has lived her entire life there, still has the royal blue satin ballroom gown her grandmother danced in at California’s first inaugural ball, in 1849. The gown, in remarkably good condition, is on display at the Lopez Adobe in downtown San Fernando, where Husbands is a volunteer.

Her grandfather, Antonio Villegas, was a vaquero on the 16,000-acre Porter Land and Water Co. ranch that surrounded the San Fernando Mission, using some of its now-dilapidated buildings as barns.

That ranch undertook the first irrigation of the Valley in the late 1880s and planted a one-by-three-mile orange grove.

Husbands lives in the house her grandparents built in San Fernando soon after they arrived there from Northern California in 1882.

But she talks little of such history, out of modesty or mistrust of her memory. Nevertheless, she remembers festive dances and picnics at the Lopez Adobe, with members of such prominent families as the Lopezes, Maclays, Picos and Rinaldis in attendance.

She also remembers that her mother, widowed young, raised four children with little money on five acres on North Maclay Street near Foothill Boulevard.

Her mother, Adella, grew vegetables, grapes, apricots, blackberries and quince, tended chickens and milked cows. She made cheese and canned the vegetables and fruit for year-round use.

She did it all, insisting that her children attend school, where they learned to speak English.

Husbands grew up speaking both languages. “My grandmother would talk to us in Spanish, and we’d answer her in English, which angered her greatly,” said Husbands.

“She said to us, ‘When I speak Spanish to you, you speak Spanish, and if I’m going to speak English, you speak English.’ ”