The Rancho Roots of Mission Viejo
Trudi Sandmeier [0:08]: Welcome to Save As, a podcast that glimpses the future of heritage conservation through the work of graduate students at the University of Southern California. I’m Trudi Sandmeier, your friendly podcast co-host.
Cindy Olnick [0:18]: And I’m Cindy Olnick, the other half of this hosting dynamic duo.
So, Trudi, pop quiz: What do my favorite color and one of your favorite places have in common?
Trudi Sandmeier [0:35]: Orange County?
Cindy Olnick [0:36]: Yes, Orange County. Brilliant. Love Disneyland.
Trudi Sandmeier [0:40]: Happiest place on earth.
Cindy Olnick [0:42]: Happiest place on earth. We’re going to talk about Orange County today.
Trudi Sandmeier [0:46]: So Cindy, what do you think of when you think of Orange County?
Cindy Olnick [0:49]: I think of going to see the Red Sox at Angel Stadium. I think of spending an amazing afternoon with the great Alan Hess, who opened my eyes to an Orange County I had never seen before when I was an L.A. snob and I mainly associated it with freeways, and very recent — tract housing, yes, and you know, the word “nondescript” comes to mind. But, like most places, if you get off the freeway and get out of your car, you’ll see some amazing stuff.
Trudi Sandmeier [1:30]: Yeah, there’s some real gems in Orange County. And it has an incredibly rich history that, you know, starts of course with the indigenous history of the land, which underpins all of our history here in the United States, but then moves on to some really fascinating history during the Spanish and Mexican periods here in California. And then goes on to this incredible boom period in the post-World War II years, where Orange County just explodes with interesting shifts in population and lots of interesting architecture happening in those postwar years. And that’s kind of what we’re going to talk about today.
Cindy Olnick [2:16 ]: Yeah, yeah. And this sort of romanticism of the area’s past in its architecture, which I think is interesting, and the time that it happened, you know, during the Chicano civil rights movement, so we’re gonna hear all about this from alumna Krista Nicholds, who got her Master of Heritage Conservation degree last year. And her thesis is called The Enduring Romance of the Rancho: Mission Viejo, 1964 to 1967. So she’ll be talking with our producer Willa Seidenberg.
Trudi Sandmeier [2:49]: So sit back and enjoy a little trip down into the OC.
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Willa Seidenberg [2:58]: Thank you for joining us on the Save As podcast, Krista, to talk about your thesis.
You are not a native of Orange County, I know. When did you move there, and what were your first impressions?
Krista Nicholds [3:12]: I moved with my family to Orange County in 2011. My first impressions were of a vast, highly dense and developed landscape. It was bewildering, actually, because it was impossible to find a center. But we eventually found San Juan Capistrano, which is well known to have a historic town center with the Mission San Juan Capistrano at its center. And that, I think, gave us a much clearer sense of place.
Willa Seidenberg [3:50]: So I haven’t spent a lot of time in Orange County. A lot of it I feel like has been bypassing it on the I-5 [freeway]. And my impressions were always spread out, relatively new, although I knew that it had been full of orange groves because of its name, Orange County. But what I was so interested in reading in your thesis was its history of the ranchos and the agriculture and ranching that took place there. Can you talk a little bit about that early history and how that developed?
Krista Nicholds [4:29]: So the northern part of the county, those older cities, really grew out of small farm tracts. The southern part of the county, those were all massive pieces of ranchland, so single landowners or a couple of landowners would own thousands of acres. And these date back to at least the Mexican period. So the land here was mostly actually cattle ranch and also sheep ranch, because it was all grasslands, rolling grasslands and chaparral, and so really ideal for cattle and sheep.
Willa Seidenberg [5:09]: If they weren’t growing a lot of crops, how did it get to be known for oranges?
Krista Nicholds [5:15]: So the orange groves were in the northern part of the county. And one of our best historians, [the late] Phil Brigandi, actually challenged the notion that Orange County was named after the orange because Orange County wasn’t actually incorporated until 1889. And the orange growing industry didn’t actually develop until just after that time or perhaps in parallel, but it wasn’t really a major focus economically until a little later. Anyway, apart from the orange groves were primarily these smaller tracts of land in these older farming towns of Santa Ana and Anaheim, and in Orange in the northern part of the county,
Willa Seidenberg [6:06]: Your thesis centers on the basic founding of Mission Viejo. Mission Viejo kind of grew out of one ranch that you profile in particular, the Santa Margarita Ranch House. Can you give us a little bit of history about that particular ranch and the family that owned it?
Krista Nicholds [6:30]: So the Santa Margarita Ranch and House were first in the possession of Pio Pico and Andres Pico. Of course, anyone who’s familiar with California history knows that Pio Pico was the last Mexican governor of California. But before that he was a prominent ranchero. He and his brother Andres Pico, the two of them owned the Santa Margarita Ranch. They were beneficiaries of the dispersal of mission lands and ranch lands, once Mexico had won its independence from Spain. And so they had the ranch from the 1840s and it was quite a prize, because it was a very large piece of land in excess of 100,000 acres.
Pico’s brother in law, [the English-born] John Forster, did assume the deed of the Rancho Santa Margarita in 1864. And by the time of his death in 1882, his family was unable to hold on to it. His family sold the Rancho Santa Margarita, and Richard O’Neill had come down from Northern California, where he was a butcher and had actually been managing a ranch. I guess he caught wind of the sale and came down and looked at it, ended up actually purchasing it with an associate, James Flood, who had made a killing in the silver mines in Nevada, and eventually the O’Neill family ended up owning 50% of it. Three owners, three or four owners, in a very short period of time in the 19th century, only over about a 40- or 50-year period. And they all did some kind of cattle ranching on the land. There were two historic adobes. One was the Rancho Santa Margarita Ranch House. It was the sort of headquarters of ranching operations. The Forsters also built a Monterey-style home that was ultimately called Las Flores Adobe.
Willa Seidenberg [8:54]: And what would Monterey style be?
Krista Nicholds [8:58]: It’s considered to be the first American style of home in California. So it has an adobe structure. But once California started to get lumber from elsewhere, they were able to put a second floor on the building. So the Monterey-style house has two floors. It tends to have a full-width balcony cantilevered on the second floor, it usually had shake roofs, so wood, and it was very symmetrical. In that sense it sort of had an American colonial appearance in its symmetry. And it usually had shutters, and this one did, at Las Flores Adobe, had these shutters. It was actually one of the first areas on the property, on the ranch, where agriculture was undertaken. And once the O’Neills took over the land, they eventually had tenants on the land, and one family in particular were tenants for a very long time. They grew a lot of lima beans, which of course was very popular in the late 19th and early 20th century, in this part of California.
An important event in the life of the Rancho Santa Margarita de Las Flores was the Second World War in 1942. A lot of the land in northern San Diego County was actually expropriated by the federal government after Pearl Harbor. So that was actually turned into Camp Pendleton, and the way it worked out with the Flood family and the O’Neill family is that they ended up with about 50,000 acres from that division in 1942. And that was the acreage in southern Orange County that ultimately became Mission Viejo and an assortment of other communities after that.
Willa Seidenberg [11:24]: So by the early 1960s, they started looking around for options for their land, what they could do with their land. And they were introduced to a developer named Donald Bren, can you talk a little bit about him and how he developed that property?
Krista Nicholds [11:44]: So obviously, regional development was nipping at the heels of the major landowners in southern Orange County by the 1950s, and the O’Neill family, they were themselves ranchers, so they weren’t anxious to turn over their land to housing developments. But eventually, it became necessary for them to do it because the County of Orange, just like counties elsewhere, they wanted to base tax on the best use for the land. And at the time, the best use was considered suburban development.
Beginning in the 1950s, you actually see on the record some efforts to sell portions of the land. One deal did occur with what eventually became Coto de Caza that had been part of the O’Neill land. But otherwise, they really wanted to be involved. They didn’t just want to sell the land to the highest bidder. So they did engage an engineering firm to look at what the potential was. And by the time they met Donald Bren, which was around 1963, they already had a pretty good idea of what the potential was, and they meet this bright, well connected mover and shaker, 30-year-old Donald Bren. And the way it was explained to me by Tony Moiso, who is the O’Neill descendant who has been running what became the Rancho Mission Viejo Company, what Tony Moiso said was that Bren was just the most convincing. He was the one with the vision that they could embrace, and that they could live with.
Willa Seidenberg [13:34]: So the focus of your thesis is the timeframe of 1964 to 1967. Tell us the significance of those years.
Krista Nicholds [13:45]: It is a very narrow timeframe. But I was really interested in narrowing in on this transition period from a time when the ranch house was really the dominant tract house, the dominant suburban house, in Orange County and elsewhere, to a kind of embrace of historical motifs. And it made sense to me just to look at the first couple of tracts. The other part of it is that Donald Bren’s tenure with the Mission Viejo Company was between 1964 and 1967. And I came to learn that he is sort of the dominant protagonist both in the birth of Mission Viejo, but also in southern Orange County as a whole and specifically with the Irvine Company, where he’s been at the helm since the ’80s.
Willa Seidenberg [14:52]: There was this shift away from the ranch houses and that’s where they started leaning more towards Spanish Colonial Revival, right?
Krista Nicholds [15:02]: Yeah, I wouldn’t say that. They leaned more toward it, I think you see a greater representation of the Spanish Colonial Revival actually later into the ’70s and ’80s. At this point in the late ’60s, you just see a very light application of Spanish details. So the house may be a ranch house, but it may have, you know, an arched entry, it would be clad in stucco, probably painted white, it could have a red tile roof. A lot of these elements wouldn’t necessarily be seen in a single house. You’d see them spread out in different models.
Willa Seidenberg [15:50]: The O’Neills and Donald Bren form this Mission Viejo Company. And then that’s the focus of your thesis is how Mission Viejo was developed by this company. Why were you attracted to telling that story?
Krista Nicholds [16:05]: First of all, I did want to focus on a topic in Orange County because Orange County’s historic built environment has not been well studied. So I wanted to contribute to that, because I’m a resident here and also I work as an advocate for Preserve Orange County. I think also the fact that it was vernacular in nature. I love high-style architecture as much as anyone who’s studied it and done a degree in it, but I was really interested in what the factors were that went into producing tract homes that most of us own and live in. One day, I met my colleague from Preserve Orange County, the architectural historian Alan Hess, at La Paz Plaza. I didn’t think anything of the place where we were located. But he started to point to the features of the plaza. And he made me realize that this was a late-midcentury example of ranch architecture or Spanish-inspired architecture. And I think that really piqued my interest at that point.
Willa Seidenberg [17:27]: At one point in your thesis, you talk about the fact that the planners didn’t want Mission Viejo to be a, quote, stereotypical development. What did that mean to them? And how did that affect the way they planned the community?
Krista Nicholds [17:45]: The developers and the planners in Mission Viejo were trying to differentiate from the tracts of homes that existed in northern Orange County and elsewhere in Los Angeles County, and all over. They had enough land, and keep in mind, it’s important that the landowner was an active part of the business from the beginning, they knew that they were going to be in it for the long haul, they could afford to look at the big picture. And the ideas of master planning were very popular at the time. You know, in the post-World War II period in Europe, master planning was implemented in different ways, interpreted in different ways in different parts of Europe, in places that had been bombed–in the suburbs of London, for example. There was an opportunity to create brand new towns–new towns, they called them.
And America had its own tradition of planning, master planning, with Clarence Stein, for example, rather than having disparate developments, you know, one builder building on a few acres here and another builder, building a few acres there, and there being absolutely no sort of planning logic in how those different communities relate to each other, or even different buildings and streets. You had the situation in Mission Viejo where they could actually plan out the commercial, the industrial, the residential, the institutional all at once. And as I mentioned, you know, the County of Orange was catching up with that by putting in place a planning district ordinance in 1963 or ’64, which enabled that kind of development to take place.
Willa Seidenberg [19:58]: What do you feel like was the thing that made it not stereotypical, or did they achieve that?
Krista Nicholds [20:06]: I think within individual developments, they achieved it. You can see it in the variety of elevations. On the houses, for example, you know, different roof forms. This is the era of the sweeping roof, or the reverse saltbox. So even while you had the cross-gabled roofs of the ranch houses, you had these other two-story roof forms, as well, by the late ’60s, even in the ranch house tracts in Los Angeles and northern Orange County. There was always a choice of finishes, but by the time you get to the 1960s, in Mission Viejo, you’re, you know, the sky’s the limit. There are all kinds of exterior finishes, different types of paneling and stone. And so the houses really did look different from each other in a way they hadn’t before. They were also larger. The first developments in Mission Viejo were built on hills, this wasn’t flat farmland, and they really did try and keep the undulation of the land that creates some, you know, some interest, some landscaping interest.
Willa Seidenberg [21:48]: When they were marketing Mission Viejo to homebuyers, there was implicit in the marketing campaign, a lot of cultural appropriation of the Mexican and Rancho era. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Krista Nicholds [22:04]: This is a period of burgeoning social movements like Chicano social movement, which I think began in Los Angeles, which was essentially a civil rights movement. It was also, you know, a kind of self-empowerment movement and a reaction to the appropriation of material culture, which had been going on for decades in Southern California. You know, we had been using Mexican and Spanish material culture to sell Southern California for, you know, since the early 20th century, if not before that–before that, actually. And so, in Mission Viejo, you know, there is this contrast between this Chicano movement going on and Mission Viejo, which was adopting the Spanish street names, they were trying to simulate adobe in some of their landscape elements and buildings, there was a very popular ad that was used that was as of a woman dressed in the clothing of a vaquero. And so there is definitely an attempt to capitalize on what we think of when we think of the romance of the past here in Southern California.
Willa Seidenberg [23:34]: So you made a point in the thesis to describe the entryway into Mission Viejo, the La Paz entry, and that there was a lot of thought given to how people would access the town. Can you describe what you see, or what you saw, when you entered the town when it was built?
Krista Nicholds [23:54]: So this was really important to Bren, in particular, to have a kind of destination created for people who were coming from mostly Los Angeles and the northern cities in Orange County. And so Bren wanted to create something that looked special, that still looked like the countryside but was still a designed landscape. And so you’d get off the 5 [freeway] and you’d cross a bridge because the train tracks were there, below the bridge, and you would be greeted by a carved wood sign that said, Mission Viejo.
And there were these curved masonry walls, which were made of a slump stone, it was called Barcelona brick. It was made to imitate adobe brick. And beyond the Barcelona walls were these round brick planters that had very large tall trees planted, and the median was all grass. And to cap it off, they developed a light standard for the community that they called the Mission Bell luminaire, which was a takeoff on the mission bell that was used for the El Camino Real that was conceived of in the early 20th century. You could also see the construction going on of the high school that was just to your right, with its red tile roof, and a church to your left, and first church, Lutheran church, Mount of Olives. The plan of Mount of Olives was very much like a mission plan. It had the dominant church at one end, and a long rectangular single-story building at the other end.
Willa Seidenberg [26:02]: Mission Viejo was incorporated in the ’80s. How do you feel that the planning of the town has held up over these last, what, 40 years?
Krista Nicholds [26:15]: Yeah, it was incorporated in 1988. And the Mission Viejo Company was the primary developer up until the time the company was purchased by Philip Morris in the ’70s. And it was at that point that the O’Neills got out of the Mission Viejo Company. The Mission Viejo Company’s original plans–with the exception of Lake Mission Viejo and Saddleback College, which were added later–I believe in Mission Viejo, the original plans were followed pretty closely in terms of zoning. In terms of architecture, I think I mentioned earlier that we started to see more red tile roofs in the ’70s. By the ’80s, you were seeing what could be called a much closer replica of Spanish Colonial Revival than we saw in the late ’60s. But a real mix, I would say, because as well, you start seeing much larger homes, the influence of a more contemporary aesthetic, as well.
Willa Seidenberg [27:33]: So one last question I want to ask you about is, you’re on the board of Preserve Orange County. When was it started? And what’s its mission and what kind of priorities has it had?
Krista Nicholds [27:45]: Preserve Orange County was started in 2016. We’re a membership-based organization. Your listeners will be familiar with the [L.A. County-focused] L.A. Conservancy, it’s a very similar mission in that we promote the conservation of the architectural heritage and cultural heritage in the county. We do a lot of advocacy, probably most of our time is spent on advocacy, particularly now during the pandemic period when we can’t conduct any architectural tours, at least in person. And it seems like the threat to historic resources hasn’t let up in recent months. So we spend a lot of time just making our voices heard at public hearings, mostly in the older cities, obviously, where there’s an older building stock. And we find ourselves defending a lot of modern buildings, modern commercial vernacular buildings.
And we do we try and also build awareness in other ways about the historic built environment. So in our newsletter, which is quarterly, we get writers who will write, who will do research about architects, or about historic sites or buildings that we believe are eligible [for landmark designation] but that have never been designated. We’re constantly trying to educate the public about what is here.
Willa Seidenberg [29:24]: It must be interesting, too, because as you said before, Orange County hasn’t been written about so much. So there must be a lot of fertile ground to cover.
Krista Nicholds [29:37]: We didn’t invent preservation in Orange County; there have been several organizations spread out in the county, not countywide organizations, but that are tied to individual city cities like Fullerton Heritage and the San Clemente Historical Society and you know, Village Laguna, all of these organizations have been around for a very long time doing the work that we do countywide. So our website is www.preserveorangecounty.org.
Willa Seidenberg [30:11]: Well thank you, Krista, for giving me a better sense of that vast area I drive through on the I-5 and some of the history of Orange County.
Krista Nicholds [30:24]: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
