Contra Costa Times
The Clayton Historical Society is breaking new ground by reaching into the past with its first Christmas Home Tour.
Homeowners of four of the city's residences, decorated for the holiday season, will throw open their front doors and offer a collective window onto the area's history.
Ted Meriam, whose house will be a gathering place near the end of the self-guided tour, is the president of the historical society.
"We have been running a successful garden tour for years, so we understand the process," he said. "And frankly, we needed another source of revenue for the historical society."
The nonprofit organization, run by volunteers for 35 years and dependent on donations, is struggling to remain viable. Ironically, despite the popularity of the garden tour, the museum's own garden was suffering.
"Two years ago, we decided it was a terrible mess and we needed to do something about it," said JoAnn Caspar, the society's treasurer. "We do a wonderful garden tour, so we thought we should at least have our garden look good. We hired a landscape gardener, then we found out we didn't really have the money, so we stopped."
Anna Wendorf, a landscape architect and a museum docent, created a design for the garden pro bono. But the design lay fallow until several members began to wonder if the same people who flocked to see Clayton's gorgeous gardens might like visiting the area's beautiful homes.
The seed for the first Christmas home tour was planted, and, appropriately, all proceeds will benefit the revitalized, three-step plan for upgrading the garden.
"We've already done stage one: cleaning up the garden," Caspar said. "The next two stages involve adding native plants of Mount Diablo and "teaching" plants like the ones used to make soapstone and other materials long ago. Landscaping to match the front of the museum is last. For all that, we need funds."
Caspar said the Clayton Valley Woman's Club had a home tour years ago. They quit, but people have been talking to her about it ever since. "I thought of doing a tour of one house: a fabulous house I knew about. But when that didn't work out, we thought of doing a tour of several homes," she said.
Carmen Williams' home is one of the four private residences on the tour. Built to resemble a Western style ranch house, it had never been painted when she bought it in 1972.
Visitors can hear her stories about the property's rock outcropping, which the original owner blasted with dynamite for retaining wall material, and learn about her family's three Christmas tree tradition.
At Meriam's home, on Oak Street, desserts, coffee and tea will be served by the fireplace. As befits a historical society president, Meriam's house comes with a past; one he is eager to tell and excited to show.
"A lot of the homes on Oak street were relocated from the Black Diamond coal mining area n the late 1800s," he said. "They actually broke them into pieces and moved them down the mountain."
"The original home was a one bedroom house. There was no kitchen, because in the late 1800s you'd be cooking over a fire and you'd burn down the house.
"At one point, the Ipsen family owned the home and there's a basement hand dug by Kent Ipsen. And there's a water well 8 by 8 feet wide. The fire engines in the '40s would roll down the gravel driveway and fill up their water tanks from the well. It was essentially one of the main water sources in Clayton."
Meriam has open-ended stories too, like the mysterious china plate shards he recently discovered while vacuuming the ash track in the home's original fireplace.
With docents and homeowners stationed at each location, the tour promises a blend of mystery, myths and family traditions passed from one generation to the next.
The tour starts at the Clayton Historical Society's museum, where a map is also included with each visitor's ticket.
