About a half-hour drive away from Fullerton, straight down Euclid, sits the Ware-Stanley House, a historic home from the late 1800s that has now been converted into a museum. Run by volunteers from the Garden Grove Historical Society, this house is a remnant of Orange County’s past that has been preserved as part of a much larger historical village, which includes the city’s first lumber business, a one-room schoolhouse, a blacksmith shop, and a garage that was originally used by Walt Disney in 1923 as an animation studio, among many other buildings that have connections to Orange County’s past.
The two-acre Stanley Ranch Museum and Historical Village is open to the public for two-hour tours on the first and third Sunday of each month; suggested donations of $5 for adults and $1 for students (up to the age of eighteen) are strongly encouraged. I recently had a chance to interview Karl Knickrehm, President of the Garden Grove Historical Society and owner of the Stanley Ranch museum, about how the nonprofit organization he leads is celebrating 60 years of preserving Orange County history.
“The Garden Grove Historical Society started in April of 1966, actually on the doorstep of a house that we now have on the property, and it grew from there,” said Knickrehm. “In 1970, when Agnes Stanley, who was the owner, sold her farm (she was 93 years old), the family donated this piece of land we’re sitting on now to the society. In 1971, her son, Emerson, donated the original Ware-Stanley house, his own house, the barn, and the tank house to the society. Since then, more buildings have been moved onto the property, including Walt Disney’s first garage studio.”…