Seams Like Old Times on Home Tour

Try one of these on for size: A silk taffeta Griswold family wedding dress from 1830, or a wedding dress linked to the feuding Hatfields and McCoys--black because of the many deaths in the family.

Those and two dozen other vintage wedding dresses will be on display at the historic Howe-Waffle House beginning Saturday as part of the sixth annual Santa Ana Historical Preservation Society Home and Garden Tour. The dresses, and a smaller number of Civil War-era military uniforms, will be on display for about one month.

The wedding dress collection belongs to Eve Faulkner, 50, a wedding planner from Upland who is moving to Santa Ana.

Faulkner, who rents her 1906 Upland home for Victorian-style weddings, says she became interested in historic wedding dresses as a result of her work. While many of her clients considered themselves modern women, she said, they requested traditional weddings.

In the name of historical accuracy, Faulkner started to research weddings of the past, and took to collecting the dresses.

The Griswold dress, from a prominent ironworks family, is the oldest on display and valued at about $3,000. The beige-colored dress is distinguished by X-shaped swaths of fabric that cross the chest, and wide upper sleeves.

At the other end of the spectrum is an 1896 black wedding dress worn by Bessie Faulkner--one of Eve Faulkner’s distant relatives--when she married into the Hatfield family of West Virginia. The dress is black to honor the deaths in the family related to the notorious feud with the neighboring McCoy family of Kentucky.

The Home and Garden tour is Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. The $8 tickets, which benefit the Historical Society, are available the day of the tour at the Howe-Waffle House, 120 W. Civic Center Drive. Information: (714) 953-1876.