August 18, 2014 - Today's adventure brought us to Santa Fe Springs, CA to visit the Hathaway Ranch and Oil Museum. Before touring the museum, we stopped by Heritage Park operated by the city of Santa Fe Springs. What a surprise the park was, and thoroughly delightful.
The conservatory was beautiful and filled with exotic plants.
Our last surprise was to see a Moreton Fig tree growing in the center of their formal garden.
The Hathaway Museum is a private museum that sits on a five acre parcel and is still owned by the Hathaway family. The Hathaways, as a group, were intelligent, inventive and true entrepreneurs who never threw anything away. In addition to their house, there is a museum here along with all of their farming, ranching, and oil drilling equipment that was accumulated from the late 19th to the mid-20th centuries. Five generations of the Hathaway family have lived and worked here.
This is the their home, built by Jesse Hathaway, mainly from materials salvaged from the Long Beach earthquake of 1933.
This is the museum, which was converted from a second home on the property.
This is their machine shop, which was originally powered by steam, then by gas engines and finally powered by electricity. It is still a 100% operational belt-drive machine shop.
This is just some of their oil drilling equipment.
This salvaged oil tank was converted to a feed bin when the Hathaways were raising cattle here.
This wagon dates to 1853 when Lola McCarric Hathaway's family moved to California from Iowa.
There was a Stockton, California company founded by Benjamin Holt that manufactured gas and diesel engines. The company moved to Peoria, Illinois in 1910 and continued operations as Caterpillar, Inc.
The original logo suggested the insects' undulating movements over the ground.
The original logo even included little "feet" on each letter.
Our tour guide, Dick, first asked us how much time we had to spend on our tour. He was a little disappointed when we said 45 minutes because he was ready to give us five hours! It was a fascinating place to see.
For all those concerned about where we ate, we had stopped at Norm's in Claremont and it's 3:30 PM now and we're still not hungry.