Focus : Neighborhood is Home to History

The two buildings with greatest historical significance in Anaheim were transplanted to this neighborhood, like the city founders themselves.

Anaheim had its start when 50 German colonists living in San Francisco wanted to move to Southern California to grow grapes and make wine. But planting grapes wasn’t their only reason: They thought San Francisco would be a bad influence on their families.

The Gold Rush of 1848 had brought saloons, miners and brothels to San Francisco. The colonists wanted to go to a new place and start afresh. So they hired surveyor and civil engineer George Hansen to choose a site and lay out the town where they would settle.

Hansen bought 1,165 acres at $2 an acre in the area that would become Anaheim. He divided the land into 20-acre lots for the vineyards, with the central 20 reserved for 64 house lots.

Hansen’s home and office from 1857 to 1863 is a modest wood-frame building, the first of its kind to be built in Orange County (adobe being the prevailing building material). Its original site was 235 N. Los Angeles St. (now Anaheim Boulevard) between Cypress and Chartres streets.

When E.E. Beazley purchased the land in the late 1920s, he thought the location would be ideal for a service station. But when he made his intentions known to tear down the house, residents protested. Beazley donated the house to the city of Anaheim.

Marie Horstmann Dwyer, a member of Mother Colony chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, offered the land on West Street where her father, F.A. Horstmann, had grown his crops. She deeded the property to the Mother Colony chapter of the DAR in 1929 and the house was moved to its present location, 410 West St.

Today, this five-room wooden house with redwood floors and a latticed porch is called the Pioneer House of the Mother Colony. (Germany was the motherland of most of Anaheim’s original settlers.) It was the county’s first museum and is today a California historical landmark.

Within its walls is the towel of “A.H.,” Amalie Hammer, the first bride of Anaheim; an upright piano, surviving a flood in 1884 and landing on a river bank while the house was washed away, was donated by Anna Fischer De Frees, the first child born to a colonist’s family.

The contiguous site on West Street offers respite for yet another house. The building known today as the American Red Cross-Anaheim House was originally located at Center and Palm Streets (today Lincoln Avenue and Harbor Boulevard), an area slotted for redevelopment. This grand two-story house, embellished with stained-glass windows and a turret crowned by a cupola, was built by John Woelke in 1894 as his residence.

But the DAR was able to save the house when Mr. and Mrs. Dwyer (Lera, the second Mrs. Dwyer) bought the house in 1950 for $5,000 and had it moved next door to the Mother Colony House. The house was subsequently donated to the Red Cross in 1953. (The Anaheim Red Cross is itself historically significant: founded in 1917, it was Orange County’s second chapter; Fullerton was first by a couple of months.)

As the site for these two buildings would suggest, much of the land here remained working farms until the turn of the century. Behind these ancient houses lie the playing fields of the Anaheim High School.

The houses in the neighborhood today are predominantly single-family homes, grand in their demeanor and some of the oldest in Anaheim. North of Lincoln Avenue the lot sizes are large. In the westernmost part of this area the trees are likely to be the oldest residents.

South of Lincoln Avenue, lot sizes are substantially smaller and houses of varying ages are in closer proximity, as Anaheim’s downtown area must have looked at its inception. But at the neighborhood’s southern border, Santa Ana Street has met the fate of many of the neighborhood’s older houses: it is torn apart--fortunately, though, for repair.

An Orange County Historical Commission marker, set on a pedestal at the westerly end of Center Street, commemorates the San Pedro Gate, which stood at the corner of West and Center streets. In earlier times a fence of living willow trees kept livestock outside the city limits, and this gate was opened to permit travel to and from San Pedro and Los Angeles.

But this gate is also a reminder of Anaheim’s birth: It was through this gate that barrels of wine were hauled to the Anaheim Landing for shipment.