General store, so much more

For the Ozment family, deciding on inventory for their general store wasn’t a complicated process. All it involved was asking neighbors what they wanted.

About 10 families lived in Harper -- a village that later became Costa Mesa -- just after the turn of the 20th century. The Ozments had moved from North Carolina, where they owned a general store.

In 1908, the family purchased an acre of land near 18th Street and Newport Boulevard and built a two-story wooden structure. The bottom floor was the Ozment General Store. The top floor was their home. A second-story balcony offered a sweeping view of the village.

It was the first commercial building in Harper. As a point of reference, the first neighborhood school was opened in a converted farm house the same year the store opened.

The following year, a post office was put in the corner of the Ozments’ building. Residents would walk to the store to shop and pick up their mail.

The Ozments knew every family by name: whether it was the Crittendens or the Rochesters.

Mabel Ozment Fuller, the eldest child in the family, said in a 1978 interview with the Costa Mesa Historical Society that her father owned the first car in town. He was called upon to do many errands, Fuller remembers.

“He trotted back and forth to Santa Ana for everybody in the county,” Fuller said in the interview.

The car also served as the area’s ambulance. She said her dad once drove a man who had suffered a foot injury baling hay to a Santa Ana hospital.

Fuller wasn’t allowed on the car trips. She and her three other siblings -- Grace, Starr and Paul -- stayed home with their mother. They played inside the house and took care of the family’s chickens.

The Ozment store carried chicken feed, among other farming products, because chickens were plentiful in the village. The store also carried groceries and an assortment of yard goods.

Fuller, who had asthma, told the Costa Mesa Historical Society it became a problem for her when the Santa Ana winds picked up because “there was no windbreak between Santa Ana and the building and it was a tall, narrow building.”

There was only one row of trees between the shop and Santa Ana, she said. So there was little stopping debris from blowing into the side of the building or onto the farm.

In the early 1910s, the family left Harper for Merced. They left there eight months later, and Fuller returned to Santa Ana.

The building that housed the Ozment General Store burned down in a 1915 fire, and another shop was erected. Fuller became a teacher and lived for decades in Santa Ana.

* THE GOOD OLD DAYS runs Sundays. Do you know of a person, place or event that deserves a look back? Let us know. Contact us by fax at (714) 966-4679; by e-mail at dailypilot@latimes.com; or by mail at Daily Pilot, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626.

20051120iq6ic4knPHOTOS FROM COSTA MESA HISTORICAL SOCIETY(LA)The Ozment family stands in front of their store at Newport Boulevard and 18th Street in Harper, which is now Costa Mesa, in 1909.20051120iq6ibtknPHOTOS FROM COSTA MESA HISTORICAL SOCIETY(LA)The Ozment General Store was at the northeast corner of Newport Boulevard and 18th Street.