The Irvine Historical Society and Old Town Irvine.
In 1976 the fervor of Bicentennial led to to the creation of many new historical societies throughout the country. The Irvine Historical Society was one of them. The Irvine Ranch was being developed as a new, modern community and celebrating or preserving the Ranch's past was not a priority in that vision. Many of the original ranch buildings were destroyed such as the Frances packing house. The City planners decided to make Sand Canyon Avenue a major thoroughfare and announced that the grvine store, in operation since 1911, would have to be demolished to support the necessary road widening. The Irvine Historical Society took on the challenge of preserving the store and as many of the remaining original buildings in the area. An agreement was made with the City and the Irvine Company that allowed a third party, a private for-profit group known as Sand Canyon Historical Partners to invest create a commercial center called Old Town Irvine. Two buildings, the store and the hotel, were moved across Sand Canyon Avenue and placed along Burt Road where several tenant homes had been located. Several of the outer buildings associated with the warehouses were removed. The post office, which had been inside the store since 1911 was moved into a remodeled tenant home. A parking lot and landscaping was added and the center was opened in 1986. Many of the original tenants of new Old Town Irvine center were not successful. A model train store and a wine cellar in the 1895 warehouse were short-lived. The Orange Inn moved from the Coast Highway to be the first tenant in the Irvine Garage. Some tenants, gone now 34 years after the center opened, were around for many years. These include the gift shop in the first floor of the store and the post office in the tenant home.
Some buildings that have not survived were important to the history of the ranch and/or the town of Irvine. Most of of these sites are worth a visit despite the loss of the original structures
San Joaquin Ranch house
The first building on the Ranch was the San Joaquin ranch house built in 1868. It was added to and had a variety of uses over the years. The original house is gone but the addition remains and is currently owned and occupied by the Irvine Historical Society for use as the Irvine Historical Museum. It is located adjacent to the Rancho San Joaquin Golf Course at 5 San Joaquin. The hours are 1 to 4 on Tuesdays and Sundays. See also the history of the Irvine Historical Society Museum. The Upper Newport Bay, also known as the Newport Back Bay once extended over a mile north from where it currently ends west of Jamboree Road just south of Newport Avenue. This ranch house was on the edge of the original bay and one of the first uses of the house after the ranch operations were moved was as the San Joaquin Duck Club.
The San Joaquin Duck Club
Hunting was popular on the Ranch but it was available only to the Irvine family and invited guests and members of the many gun and hunting clubs located on the Ranch.
Katie Wheeler Library and OC Park
The Irvine family originally lived in San Francisco and hired CE French to run the ranch. After the 1906 earthquake, James Irvine II decided to move to the ranch and built a magnificent home near what is now the corner of Jamboree Road and Irvine Blvd. After the alleged suicide of Myford Irvine in the house in 1959, the family no longer used it. In 1965 it was slightly damaged by fire and demolished in 1968. The Katie Wheeler branch of the Orange County library system was built on the site. The outside is a replica of the original Irvine home and the interior is a less accurate re-creation required by the current use but has copies of many Irvine family photos decorating the walls. Because the home was the administrative center of the Irvine ranch for 50 years, many other buildings were located in the immediate area. There were homes for key (supervisory) employees, barns, bunkhouses and a blacksmith shop. A good portion of the site is now an Orange County park. Many of the original buildings have been preserved and are being restored for various uses. Farm machinery is also being preserved there. Some additional buildings have been moved to the site to preserve them as well.
The original home is shown in this undated photo. This is the side of the home that faced north.
Packing house facade
The Ranch at various times packed and shipped large amounts of many types of products from the warehouses of the Old Town area, For oranges, the Irvine Company built the Frances packing house along the Venta spur of the Santa Fe line in northeast Irvine. When later development forced the demolition of the building, a portion of the facade was saved and moved to the interior wall of the Irvine Savings and Loan. In the mid 1970s, the bank gave away some of the original orange crate labels to customers. While Irvine Savings and Loan has not survived, the facade has and can be seen inside First Bank at 14376 Culver Drive in Walnut Village.
A note on roads and the Ranch
In the beginning, there was El Camino Real which traveled through Tustin and then crossed the railroad tracks on the Ranch on it's way to San Juan Capistrano. This was not a perpendicular crossing originally but one that was closer to a 45 degree angle. There were warehouses built along the north side of the tracks, on the east side of the crossing. There were no signals here to warn of approaching trains and the long warehouses obscured the view of southbound travelers crossing the intersection from seeing northbound trains. The intersection was the site of many injuries and fatalities and finally, in 1929, the intersection was changed to a perpendicular crossing. The road north from the railroad tracks was known usually as Munger Road after the many members of that family that were proprietors of the general store which faced the road just north of the crossing. On the south side of the crossing, the road was known as Laguna Road Over the years, El Camino Real became known as the Coast Highway and the San Diego Highway. Eventually the road was designated Highway 101 and kept that label until the construction of Interstate 5 on a new alignment just north of the traditional route.
There was once a lot of trees along the roads on the ranch. The San Diego highway was planted with oak trees in April of 1916 as part of a county highway beautification project. By 1918 there were public outcries that the trees were being removed by farmers who found the trees blocked access to their leased land. All the trees were gone from the train station to San Juan Capistrano in 1928. There were pepper trees trees lining Laguna Road, some of which made it until the 1990s when street widening caused their demise. When the acreage was planted with citrus, eucalyptus trees, known as gum trees at the time, were used as windrows. There are isolated rows of these trees still existing in the city.
As with El Camino Real being the first first road, the land was known in the beginning as the Rancho San Joaquin or the San Joaquin Ranch. When the post office was established on June 10, 1899, it was called Myford because the name Irvine was already in use for a post office in Calvaras county. In 1914, the name was changed to Irvine when the northern California post office no longer used the name. East Irvine was created in 1965.
Though not identified very explicitly anymore, an area of west Irvine is designated as the Irvine Industrial Complex. It was designed to be 4000 acres of offices and light industrial buildings up to and including major manufacturing facilities for very small to large companies. The boundaries for the area are Bristol Street, Jamboree Boulevard, Barranca Road and the Newport Freeway. The first phase of the Complex opened in 1965. A second IIC, known as IIC East comprises about 2000 acres . The boundaries of IIC East are roughly north of the San Diego/Santa Ana Freeway, east and south of the Great Park. Construction started in the spring of 1976 and was ready for occupancy in the summer of 1979. The streets in the complexes are all named in honor of scientists and business leaders. Some of the names are not very well known today and the vast majority of the people the streets are named for never had any connection to the Ranch. There is one very notable exception. Michelson Drive is named for Albert A Michelson. a physicist who actually measured the speed of light. He performed many experiments to measure the speed and the last one was performed on the Ranch. In 1929, he received permission to build the tube used for the experiment. It was 3 feet in diameter and a mile long. Construction began in July 1929 and was completed the following summer. There were mirrors at each end to reflect the light down the mile length for a total effective length of 10 miles. There were an assortment of problem in building the testing pipe. First, it was difficult to get that much pipe, next it was difficult to install the pipe on the structures (it was an above ground installation) to keep it perfectly straight for a whole mile, and last it was difficult to seal the pipe well enough to create a vacuum strong enough to make the experiment valid. The experiments finally began in 1931 with Michelson, age 78, then in failing health. Einstein came for a visit in February and the experiments became national news. Michelson passed away in May of 1931 but the experiments continued under the direction of other scientists. A couple of questions readily come to mind. First, what happened to the tube? On March 10, 1933 the Long Beach earthquake hit, damaging both the pipe and supports. By the end of the month, the pipe had been sold to the Orange County Highway Department for drain pipe. And the second question is where EXACTLY was this pipe? It appears on a 1932 aerial map and well as on a AAA map from the 30's. Comparing the location of the pipe on the photo and the map relative to other features which still exist today, the location of the pipe can be pretty well identified. The pipe remember was a mile long and ran from the corner of Main Street and Mercantile Street to the southeastern intersection of Alton Parkway an Armstrong Avenue. If you want to be very precise, there is a building at 1910 Main Street that has a driveway entrance off of Mercantile and one end of the tube was about where that driveway enters/exits from Mercantile. On a modern map and locate the ends as described, the a line drawn between the two is parallel to and very near Orange County Flood Control District channel F08S01 which was a drainage ditch that ran next to pipe in the early 1930s. Armstrong Avenue todays runs parallel to where the pipe was constructed. When northeast bound Armstrong Avenue reaches Alton Parkway, it jogs southeast a short distance on Alton before continuing in the northeast direction. The other end of the pipe was very near the left corner as Armstrong Avenue continues northeast. For those curious about how the light was put into the tube and how it was taken out, the photos below show the schematic of how this was accomplished as well as a photograph of the actual experiment.