New O.C. Museum Lets Visitors See Life in Bygone Decades of California

Surrounded by a freeway, strip malls and a real estate office advertising million-dollar-plus homes, the 135-year-old Ramon Peralta Adobe couldn’t be more out of place in the bustling suburbia of Anaheim Hills.

But that’s exactly why people like Diana Robles fought so hard to preserve the area’s only surviving adobe from the era of the Spanish and Mexican land grants and turn it into her neighborhood’s first museum, which opened to the public last week.

“We need history,” said Robles, a descendant of the Yorbas, a pioneering Santa Ana Canyon family. “There’s not much history left around here. Nearly everything else from the old days has been knocked down.”

Built in 1871 by Ramon Peralta on land granted to his grandfather by the Spanish governor in 1810, the small adobe has survived fires, floods and decades of neglect to resurface as a piece of history. Since Orange County’s Harbors, Beaches and Parks agency bought the adobe in 1976, it has been a meeting place for historical groups and a field trip destination for schoolchildren. But mostly it has been vacant.

A few years ago, there was talk that the adobe might become a fast-food restaurant. In late 2004, the Santa Ana Canyon Historical Council, led by member Sandra Day, decided the community would be better served if the building came back to life as a museum.

The 80-member historical society chipped in $3,000 to get the project going and began collecting artifacts and heirlooms from descendants of the region’s early families. The group enlisted local artist Matthew Southgate to paint a mural portraying life in Santa Ana Canyon through the years.

The mural, which wraps around about half of the adobe, starts with Spanish explorers arriving by sea and shows vast expanses of open land punctuated by cattle. At its end, the mural depicts the same land congested with houses, schools, railways and businesses.

The adobe’s interior is sparse. In one room, a child’s bed sits on a dirt floor -- the structure’s original surface -- next to a table full of schoolbooks and report cards from the 1920s. Throughout the structure, cutouts in the walls show layers of stone that formed its original foundation.

Harold Schaffer, whose family lived in the adobe in the late 1940s and ran a neighboring cafe, said he is pleased the canyon’s history is being preserved for future generations.

“It’s important that people know the truth and to have an insight into what life was like before we modernized everything,” said Schaffer, 66, who now lives in Dana Point. “Before the densification of the population and before all the pollution.” Those were days when the canyon was full of citrus groves, cattle ranches, eucalyptus trees and small adobes. Today, all that remains of that community is one small building.

“These historic buildings remind us of where we’ve been and how far we’ve come,” said Anaheim City Councilwoman Lorri Galloway, who attended the museum’s April 28 opening. “Outside those doors, you could hear the traffic on Santa Ana Canyon Road. I wonder if people back then could have ever envisioned how we live today.”

The Ramon Peralta Adobe museum, 6398 E. Santa Ana Canyon Road, is free and open to the public on Saturdays from 10 a.m. until noon and for school tours during the week.

There are plans to make the museum more interactive, with brick-building and corn-grinding stations on the patio and lessons on how to lasso a horse.