Saving Dronhame (In Technicolor)
Written by Mark LewisOriginally published Ojai Quarterly, Spring 2019
THE DRON FAMILY IN 1942, LEFT TO RIGHT: BOYD, JOHN JR, DOROTHY, AND THEN-CAPTAIN DRON
Major John Dron was Ojai’s own John Muir: an ahead-of-his-time naturalist, a one-man Scottish Enlightenment in the flesh, and the self-styled Laird o’ Dronhame, the rustic stone house he built for his family high up on Gridley Road in the National Forest. (“Hame” is the Scottish dialect for “home.”) When the great forest fire of 1948 threatened to destroy this house, Dron and his eldest son, Jack, mobilized a team to fend off the flames. After the Major’s death, his daughter and son-in-law carried on the tradition in 1985 by saving the house from the Wheeler Fire; in December 2017, his daughter-in-law Karin and one of his grandsons helped save it from the Thomas Fire. And so Dronhame still stands as an enduring monument to its builder, one of those legendary local characters who helped make Ojai what it is today.
John Anderson Dron was born in Ayr, Scotland, in 1893 but did not remain there for long. In 1897, his mining engineer father took the family to Glasgow to board the liner S.S. Furnessia, bound for New York. By 1900, the Drons had landed in Big Oak Flat in California’s Tuolumne County, near Yosemite Valley National Park.
ETCHING BY JOHN ANDERSON DRON
“He grew up in the foothills of the Sierras,” his granddaughter Dorothy Dron-Smith says. “He was an outdoors person.” A highly educated one, thanks to his mother. “She taught him classical Greek and Latin in the mining camp,” says his grandson Laurence Malone.
Dron, in later years, would regale his children and grandchildren with the story of his childhood encounter with John Muir, the legendary Scottish-born naturalist who co-founded the Sierra Club. As a boy of ten or eleven, Dron was fishing in the Tuolumne River one day when Muir happened along and admired his catch.
“That’s a nice string o’ trout, laddie,” Muir told him — a line Dron would deliver in a deep Scottish accent, a la Muir. Despite having only lived in Scotland for three years, Dron proudly retained his own accent all his life and would deepen it for effect when quoting the likes of Muir or Robert Burns or Robert Louis Stevenson.
“You would think he was raised in Scotland,” Dron-Smith says.
In fact, he was raised in California, and not just in the Sierras. Dron attended Berkeley High School and took a few classes at the University of California. But his natural classroom was the great outdoors. Literally following in Muir’s footsteps, Dron “was a wilderness guide throughout the Sierras,” Malone says.
Dron married Dorothy Cook in January 1921, and they welcomed John A. Dron Jr. to the family that December. A daughter, Dorothy, came along in 1928. Largely self-taught as a civil engineer, Dron was working on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu in 1929 and staying at a camp near Sycamore Canyon when he encountered the Ojai architect Austen Pierpont, who offered him a job. Dron accepted and moved his family to Ojai. It would be his home for the rest of his life.
In Ojai, Dron added surveying to his professional repertoire. He also served the community as ex-officio city engineer, and in 1938, he served as the Works Progress Administration chief for Ventura County. In 1939, he was among the founders of the Art Center. (He surveyed the lot for the building, which Pierpont designed, and he served on the organization’s board for many years.) Dron also cultivated his own artistic side, making his mark with watercolor paintings, wooden carvings, copperplate etchings, and ornamental ironwork pieces such as the silhouette of the young boy reading a book that has graced the Ojai Library sign since 1930.
METAL SIGN, 1930
JOHN DRON BUILDING DRONHAME
But his most ambitious artistic undertaking was Dronhame. Dron had acquired eighteen acres off Gridley Road in exchange for work he undertook to perform for the Gridley Mutual Water Company. In 1932, he installed his family (including a third child, infant son Boyd) in a tent on the property and commenced work on a stone house. His architect friend Pierpont is assumed to have contributed to the Craftsman-inspired design, but Dron was the artisan who brought it to life. A rambling, nine-room manse, Dronhame was built with native rock supported by redwood beams salvaged from oil derricks and water flumes. The laird’s touch can also be seen in the handmade doors and the ornamental wrought-iron work.
“This was years in the building,” says Boyd’s widow, Karin Dron, the current owner and occupant.
A year after Dron started work on the house, nature delivered him a warning in the form of the massive Matilija Fire, which erupted in September 1932 and burned 220,000 acres in the National Forest. This inferno was the largest recorded fire in California history to that point, a distinction it would retain for seven decades until 2003. But it stayed north of Nordhoff Ridge and thus spared Ojai, and the work on Dronhame continued.
DRONHAME, 1934
The family had moved into the main house by December 7, 1941, but the project was not yet finished when the news from Pearl Harbor prompted Dron to put down his tools. He had already served in the Army during World War I; now he signed up again and carved a message into a rock on his property to the effect that work on Dronhame had been suspended “until victory is ours.”
With that victory secured in 1945, Dron returned to finish the job. (Having retired from his second tour of duty with the rank of Major, he would henceforth be known in Ojai as Major Dron.) He also launched a campaign to rally opposition against the Matilija Dam, which he considered a poorly designed boondoggle that might collapse. He lost that fight, and the dam was built over his objections. (He was proved right about its design when the new reservoir silted up, rendering the dam useless.) But he had more success with his next fight against the great fire of 1948.
That September, a butane leak at the Wheeler Hot Springs resort touched off a blaze that quickly got out of control, and the flames raced up over the top of Nordhoff Ridge and down toward Dronhame. Dron and his eldest son, Jack, had a crew of friends and well-equipped helpers at the ready.
“We watched the fire burning slowly down the mountain, expecting it about midnight,” Dron wrote in an account for The Ojai newspaper. “We planned to backfire, but about 7:15 pm, we noticed numerous spot fires below the fire line, indicating a shift of wind. In fifteen minutes, these had consolidated into a solid front of flame downhill. It was still about a half a mile above us. We were all prepared. The house had been battened down, and sheet metal…had been placed over the windows. Every available carpet, pad, and canvas was saturated and laid on the roof. Then, about 8 pm, we noticed a spot fire on the ridge below us, then one to the right and left of us. Then I ordered my daughter Dorothy and my youngest son Boyd to take a station wagon loaded with our possessions and get out in a hurry.”
Dron and Jack remained. They were on the roof with garden hoses, wetting down the building when the fire arrived.
“The heat finally became so intolerable we were driven off the roof…The heat was so intense that we could only face it by wrapping wet towels around our heads and taking turns spraying each other with water to prevent our clothes from catching fire. We saw two foxes race across our front lawn and several deer. By that time, the flanking fire had encircled the house and was closing in below us. Then, the main fire struck the backfire. For five minutes, we were surrounded on all sides by towering flames and were in a literal vortex.”
Dron did not mention it in this account, but he and Jack did not retreat from the house. Instead, per their plan, they dove into the cellar and closed the door behind them, reasoning that the flames would quickly pass by, allowing them to re-emerge to extinguish any spot fires.
“Just at the crisis, which came about 8:45, our domestic water gave out, discharging black mud,” he wrote. “In a few minutes, a valve in the main line blew up with a loud report, discharging steam. We had provided an auxiliary supply in buckets, tubs, and tanks amounting to 150 gallons, and from then on, the pumpers directed streams on the house while my son and I put out spot fires and debris with buckets. In ten minutes, the crisis was past, and the main front of the fire had advanced downhill hundreds of feet below. Still, a hot wind of twenty or thirty miles per hour was driving a continual cascade of burning embers and sparks against the house. Fortunately, the walls were of stone, and the windows were protected by sheet metal coverings. In twenty minutes, there was nothing left of the surrounding area but innumerable burning dumps and accumulations of leaves.”
JOHN ANDREW DRON JR IN THE SNOW OF 1949
Having saved his home from the fire, Dron devoted much of his remaining twenty-five years to saving Ojai from other sorts of threats, especially those posed by the unchecked development that was consuming the rest of Southern California.
“We lost a fight here,” he wrote to a friend in 1960. “A City Council was elected which favors the subdividers and other exploiters of the Valley, but the fight will go on, for Ojai is too precious a place to be sold down the river to a bunch of greedy, ignorant businessmen ‘whose only gospel is their maw!’ Like vultures after carrion, these people are drawn by the prospects of development predicated upon the Casitas Dam, and they are feverishly promoting all sorts of enterprises to make a fast buck, regardless of the consequences to the community.
POSTCARD VIEW OF FOOTHILL ROAD IN RIALTO, PUBLIC DOMAIN
“Yesterday, I returned from several days’ trip to those places southeast of LA, as far as Pomona, and I saw what can happen here — long miles of tawdry, blatant commercialization along the Foothill Road, and I thought, Good God! That is what we are facing in Ojai. What kind of people are these that can take a fair countryside and deface and debase it with every sort of hideously ugly and vulgar structure that perverted imagination can conceive?”
Dron was not the only person in Ojai who felt this way, but he was among the more energetic and outspoken — a “howling dervish,” as he described himself in another letter. And, as ex-officio city engineer and an Ojai Civic Association trustee, he was a man of influence in the community.
“Like David and Goliath (almost single-handedly), he tackled and bested the giant Edison Co. when it proposed a defacing high-tension line with steel towers across the face of our bordering mountains,” Dron’s friend Dr. Charles Butler would recall at his memorial service. “This at a time when ecology with a capital ‘E’ was almost unheard of.”
“He fought for the things that make Ojai what it is,” Karin Dron says.
Dron’s interests were not limited to preserving Ojai from over-development. He was a self-educated Renaissance man who made himself an expert in an enormous range of topics and shared his knowledge freely with whomever he encountered.
“He liked to talk,” Malone says. “He was filled with stories.”
“He was eccentric,” Dron-Smith says. “He was a character.”
Dorothy Cook Dron died in 1952, leaving the Major to preside over an empty nest. But Ojai abounded with his children and grandchildren, for whom Dronhame served as a beloved ancestral home where the clan could gather.
“We were a pretty close family growing up,” Dron-Smith says. “We all got together at Christmas at Dronhame.”
JOHN DRON IN THE OJAI ARCADE
When the Major died in April 1973 at seventy-nine, the entire county took notice. In Ventura, the Board of Supervisors adjourned early to honor his memory. In Ojai, friends and family gathered at the Art Center, where he had laid the cornerstone thirty-four years earlier, to hear Dr. Butler’s eulogy. In the Ojai Valley News, the Major’s friend D. Ric Johnson penned an elegy for “one of those who made Ojai, Ojai.”
“He was a classic Scot with their passion for learning; an abstract thinker with a pendulum swing from effervescence to melancholy,” Johnson wrote. “When being a dour Scot he ‘sipped his sorrer wi a long spoon,’ as he was wont to say…The delightful evenings spent in front of the inevitable fireplace, the night raw outside, and John reeling off vastnesses of poetry or reading philosophy, Plutarch, Henry Adams, his own letters to the great personages and their replies…The valley is less warm and less home now.”
The Major’s heirs kept Dronhame in the family but rented it out to people like Shahastra and Zubin Levy, who lived there from 1989 to 2010. Shahastra [belonged] to the Ojai Studio Artists, so Dronhame, during this period, was a regular stop on the group’s annual studio tour.
“We loved it there, the foothills, the beauty, the old stone house that felt like we were part of the landscape,” Shahastra says. “We lived and created there, hiked there, sponsored community gatherings there. Dronhame is a wonderful, historic place that has housed many interesting people. It had two cabins, which were always rented to some very unusual people, many of whom needed to heal there, recuperate there, be in nature, etc.”
Being in nature is not always a benign experience at Dronhame. In July 1985, the Wheeler Fire came roaring over Nordhoff Ridge, following the path of its 1948 predecessor. At the time, Karin and Boyd were on a camping trip in Northern California. They jumped in the car and drove to Ojai to find that Boyd’s sister Dorothy Rail and her husband Robert Rail had saved the house and its outbuildings.
“We drove all night; got here at daybreak,” Karin says. “It was still smoky and embers flying.”
Karin and Boyd had built their own version of Dronhame in Sisar Canyon in Upper Ojai, a stone house where they raised their daughters. But in 2010, after Boyd’s health began to fail, they moved to Dronhame, which is closer to town. He died there in his childhood home in 2014, after which Karin honored his memory by donating an easement to the Ojai Valley Land Conservancy to preserve the final section of the Conservancy’s Fuelbreak Road Trail.
The Fuelbreak Road, of course, is not just a hiking trail; it’s a line of defense against wildfires. But on the evening of December 6, 2017, it could not stop the Thomas Fire from sweeping down on Dronhame.
Now, it was Karin Dron’s turn to defend the Major’s manor. She would have no help from firefighters, who considered Dronhame a lost cause. And stone walls would not guarantee its survival, as Karin knew all too well, having just learned that her stone Sisar Canyon house had perished two nights earlier when the Thomas Fire swept through Upper Ojai. Now, Dronhame was all she had left. But who would help her save it? Dorothy Dron Rail had died in 2001, Jack Dron in 2007, and Robert Rail in 2013, so the Major’s children and son-in-law were all gone. Of his eight grandchildren, only Dorothy Dron-Smith still lived in Ojai, and she and her husband had their own house in Sisar Canyon to worry about.
But another grandchild, Karin’s nephew Laurence Malone, happened to be visiting Dronhame from his home near Santa Fe, NM. Malone, along with family friends Rick Bisaccia, Mike Gourley, and Mike Gridley, rallied for the cause, and Malone and Bisaccia began chopping down the ceanothus bushes and other chaparral near the house.
“Six or seven hours of cutting and schlepping,” Malone says. “My hands were bleeding from dragging four or five stalks of ceanothus at a time down to a small clearing on the southwest side of the house.”
They were familiar with the house’s storied history and how Major Dron & Co. had saved it from the 1948 conflagration.
“I can tell you that the Major’s story was one that we’d read many times and were thinking about it hard, as the eighty-foot wall of flame headed for us,” Bisaccia later wrote in a Facebook post. “For sure, we saved that house — working for about six hours clearing brush and wetting the bone-dry redwood exterior down…We left when spot fires started exploding around us — the Sheriff’s Department had already taken our names in case we perished in the fire.”
Malone, a five-time national champion cyclocross bicycle racer, evacuated on his bike down Gridley Road to Grand Avenue, where he looked back “and watched in horror as the fire advanced. I could see the Dronhame light Karin had left on, which soon flickered out.” As Malone looked on, two columns of flame emerged from two arroyos to form a V-shaped inferno some 300 yards above the house: “The V-shaped flame covered the 300 yards in a twinkling, and at that point, I thought the house was lost.”
But early the next morning, Karin drove up Gridley and spotted the light, which had flickered back to life — proof that she still had a home and that the Major’s legacy lived on.
“We didn’t do a fraction of what the Major did in ’48 and barely had any water pressure, let alone water in tubs — and pretty much all the buildings surrounding the house turned to ash, but next morning, sure enough, the old place stood unscathed,” Bisaccia wrote. “The good news was that four sixty-somethings with low water pressure saved that house with the spirit of Major Dron cheering us on.”
Saving Dronhame “is kind of a family tradition,” Karin says. “So that tradition lives on.”
For how long? Thirty years hence, when another cataclysmic fire roars over the Nordhoff Ridge, will Dronhame still be there, and will there still be Drons in Ojai to save it? Impossible to say. But the Major himself will be there. The family still has the urn containing his ashes, which was long consigned to storage. Plans are afoot to inter it on the Dronhame property the next time the clan gathers.
“It’s going to happen,” Malone says. “Maybe this winter.”
If the Major’s descendants want to mark the occasion with a few appropriate words, they could borrow this passage from the eulogy Dr. Butler delivered for his friend at the Art Center back in 1973:
“In retrospect, then, we find we knew and loved someone quite unique: a professional engineer, an organizer, an artist, a conservationist, an intellectual wonder, a valued citizen who freely served his community; above all, a staunch and loyal friend. Truly, he was a man for all seasons.”
Want another Thomas Fire story?
Heather Stobo and Lisa Casoni’s evacuation sparks sweet inspiration.
COVER: Photo illustration from photo by Brandi Crockett.All archival photos have been colorized.
