Tree’s still sticking it out

The 125-year-old pepper tree in front of City Hall has undergone emergency surgery to halt decay.

“We are trying to keep the tree as safe as possible as long as possible,” said Vic Hillstead, city parks and building manager.

The prognosis is not good, but the city has taken three cuttings from the tree, which have done rather well.

“We just transplanted them into 29-gallon boxes,” Hillstead said. The rootlings will be used to replace the revered tree in the event that it cannot be saved.

Attempts to propagate seed from the tree failed.

Downtown homesteader George Rogers and his 6-year-old daughter, Elizabeth Sarah Rogers, planted the tree in 1881 when the family moved into their newly built home where City Hall now stands, according to Beryl Wilson Viebeck, Rogers’ grand niece.

The information and a photograph of a city-owned painting of the home and the pepper tree was included in Viebeck’s “oral history,” compiled by Eileen DeCair for Cal State Fullerton, a copy of which can be seen at the Laguna Beach Library.

“They light [the tree] every year at Christmas time, like a Christmas tree,” Viebeck told DeCair. “I’ve been to that ceremony and I’ve been thrilled when that tree lights up.”

Rogers paid $1,000 for 155½ acres of downtown Laguna ? which wasn’t a town at the time ? and sub-divided some of it. He ranged cattle on the hillside above the home he built on Forest Avenue for his wife, Lottie and their four children. Seven more children were born to the couple, four of them while that branch of the family tree still lived in Laguna.

George and his brother Henry Rogers planted the eucalypti that gave Forest Avenue its name, and inspired the sobriquet “Eucalyptus School” for Laguna Beach impressionists’ paintings.

And it was Henry who put an empty two-story house in Temple Hills on skids and moved it downtown to be added to his brother’s home, which gave the eight children an upstairs for their bedroom.

The Laguna Beach Woman’s Club, organized in 1922 to benefit the residents of Laguna Beach through philanthropy, bought the Rogers home for a clubhouse.

When the city asked the club to exchange its property for another site, the club exacted a promise that city officials would never remove the pepper tree on the downtown parcel.

And it is still standing, at least for a bit longer.cpt.05-peppertree-CPhotoInfo131QJPHC20060505iypq5nncLINDA NGYUEN / COASTLINE PILOT(LA)The 125-year-old pepper tree which has received treatment for decay, in front of City Hall.