Tales of the Oaks

Nearly two years ago, I began the process of writing a book on the history of the Oaks neighborhood of Santa Paula. Actually, at the time I didn’t know I was writing a book; I thought I was simply doing a bit of research into a few homes in the neighborhood where I happen to live.

As a historian, it seemed not quite right that I knew almost nothing about how my neighborhood came into existence, or who lived here in decades past. It also seemed odd to me that nobody had recorded the neighborhood’s history, considering the powerful and distinct identity it has in our community. The neighborhood became very important to Santa Paula‚ but how, and why?

So I began researching. One topic lend to another, and before I quite understood where I was headed, a book was beginning to emerge. The book is now complete, and set for publication on June 30. More about that later, but in this column I would like to introduce you to the neighborhood as I discovered it over the course of my research and writing.

This discovery came in the form of several surprises. The first was that the Oaks isn’t a place that can be as easily defined as we might assume. The majority of what is generally called the Oaks was created by three residential tracts recorded in 1926-27: the Fern Oaks, Oakdale and Reddick subdivisions. The streets Woodland, Fern Oaks, Manzanita, Forest, Greenwood, Laurel, Mariposa, Oakdale, Holly and Los Robles were all created by these subdivisions. Conspicuously missing from this list is Say Road, which was not brought into being by any of these subdivisions.

And yet, probably everyone agrees that Say Road is very much a part of the Oaks. Say Road turns out to be the first public street in the neighborhood, though it was created long before a neighborhood was even imagined. It was dedicated to the county in 1893 by Santa Paula Canyon pioneer John R. D. Say. The Say name might have been preserved in the street, but the history of the family proved to be far more elusive.

Chasing down John Say and family led quickly beyond the road named for them, to land further up the canyon where the Say home once stood. John Say was the brother-in-law of Wallace L. Hardison, cofounder of Union Oil, who lived next door on the west side of Ojai Road. They both came to Santa Paula from Pennsylvania during the mid-1880s and bought much of the land where the neighborhood would be created much later. Suddenly the boundaries of the Oaks‚ were expanding to include much of lower Santa Paula Canyon. It turned out that the history of the neighborhood could not be easily confined, or separated from the canyons history.

Much of the other canyon land that became the three Oaks subdivisions was owned by the Harrison Crumrine family. Their name isn’t preserved on a street, but their family home is, on Cadway Street, a short cul-de-sac on the west side of Ojai Road. In a way, their name is also preserved in the oak trees themselves, which gave the neighborhood its name. Beginning in the 1880s, Harrison Crumrine allowed his cattle ranching lands on the east side of Ojai Road to be used as a sort of public park. This land was known as Crumrine’s Grove, and remained a popular location of community gatherings well into the 1920s.