Photograph by Edmund Lee
The Warner Hutton house shortly after being moved
Although, as has been noted in this space, historic preservation isn't exactly a hot-button issue hereabouts, it can be nudged in that direction by careless statements from people like me.
In a previous article, I described the McWilliams House (Chamber of Commerce office) and the Historical Museum as the outstanding examples of preservation accomplished by the moving of structures. This overlooked completely the example of the Warner Hutton House, next to City Hall, which exemplifies state-city cooperation in preserving a historical structure by moving it to avoid demolition.
The Warner Hutton story has intrigued me ever since I read it in Sawyer's 1922 History of Santa Clara County. Mr. Hutton, born in New York state in 1842, came with his parents to Saratoga by way of San Francisco in 1870, when his father bought a ranch on Quito Road. A thriving orchard was developed, but young Warner, who was of a mechanical bent, wanted to be a locomotive engineer--an ambition that has a certain resonance with me. However, his widowed mother didn't want him to leave, and she lived to nearly 100. So the son dutifully performed the home chores, becoming a prominent orchardist and, it seems, never getting married. Now, he is remembered for the handsome structure that is being made into a teen center.
Also in that article, I dismissed the examples of voluntary structural preservation simply as "too few." Numerically, this may be so, but to minimize those efforts is to do the owners a great disservice. May their tribe increase.
All of which brings up the basic question of historic preservation. Why should we bother with it at all? It is true that the current level of concern is a latter-day phenomenon. In my youth, demolition of historic structures was of no real concern; you might say we were too close to our past, and we just took these things for granted.
An outstanding example was the old town jail on Fourth Street, which was torn down in 1937 so the owner could use the lumber for the building of a garage. That jail could have dated back to the 1870s. It was a rather primitive lockup, used mainly for the detention of drunks until they could sober up. Today, its less-than-Spartan accommodations probably would invite the attention of the American Civil Liberties Union, but back then it was just your basic durance vile. Close by were the two-wheel, man-pulled hose cart of the volunteer fire department and the steel-framework tower for the old fire bell. When these artifacts disappeared, there was no hue and cry as there would be today.
Now, the whole picture has changed. Caught up in a world of events incomprehensible to many, we look to cherished and familiar landmarks to reassure us of our community identity. But where do we strike a balance between wholesale frozen-in-time preservation, and removal of an old building just because it's in the way?
The city's Heritage Preservation Commission, which is an advisory body, is pressing for a strengthened preservation ordinance. But even in the most exemplary legislation, a property owner still has the ultimate right to destroy a building; he or she just may have to jump through more hoops to do it.
The impetus must come from the individual, and in that regard, allow me to be immodest enough to quote from my own writings, the foreword to Florence Cunningham's Saratoga's First Hundred Years:
"A community that mushrooms into a city without consciousness or regard for its historical antecedents too often is a community without character, a community which, to its thousands of new inhabitants, has nothing to distinguish it from others in which they have lived. It is, too often, just another city.
"But when the life of a community can be seasoned with tradition and an awareness of the contributions of its past citizens, the benefits extend far beyond the momentary interest stirred by the revelation of some particular historical fact.
"For then there is identity, a standard to maintain, a stimulus for further creative effort. Of such ingredients is that most desirable of municipal traits, civic pride."
Your Honor, the plaintiff rests.
This article appeared in the Saratoga News, August 28, 1996.
©1996 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved