This May, in celebration of National Preservation Month, Fullerton Heritage hosted free historic walking tours of downtown Fullerton and Hillcrest Park. Their tours are typically $5, so I decided to take advantage of the free walks and check out the Hillcrest Park tour led by Fullerton Heritage member Kay Miller.

​According to a 2019 article written by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Preservation Month was originally Preservation Week when it was first signed into law in 1973. It wasn’t until 2005 that the National Trust extended the celebration to the whole month of May.

At the start of Memorial Day weekend, I joined Kay Miller’s tour group, which had congregated around a small stone monument at the center of the Hillcrest Park parking lot near the children’s playground off the corner of Valley View and Lemon. Miller began the tour by asking everyone if they had a special memory of the park before recounting her own.

Fullerton Heritage Tour Guide Kay Miller listens to a member of the tour group recount memories of Hillcrest Park in front of the war memorial

​“I came to this park in the ‘50s,” recounted one person. “I could run all over this park, from the duck pond to the top of the park and everything in between, going on secret little trails. So, I really enjoyed this place even though I didn’t live in Fullerton. My folks lived here during WWII, and they lived in a little rental house on Malvern. They told me their stories of riding bicycles through all the orange groves around here, but they always went to the Fox Fullerton, and they came to Hillcrest Park.”

​The small monument we had stood beside had plaques commemorating the park’s history. In 2005, Hillcrest Park was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and it also happens to be the city’s sixth local landmark. Miller explained that the land was originally bought by the city in 1920, although part of the property had been purchased in 1913 to install a reservoir. Interestingly, the city had a contest for naming the grounds, and somebody submitted the name “Hillcrest Park.” According to Miller, prior to becoming a park, the property was very barren. She said that the owner of Dean Hardware (the old hardware store in downtown Fullerton) stored his dynamite on the north side of the park.

“It was barren out here, so what better place to get it out of the downtown than on the other side of that hill, so that’s what it looked like back in that era,” said Miller. “All the work for the plaques here today is the result of some very dedicated historians and folks from Fullerton Heritage. Before her, Deb Richey and Cathy Thomas did all of the research to get this on the National Register of Historic Places. I’ve based a lot of what I’m going to say on this tour on their research as well as documents in the Local History Room at the Fullerton Public Library.”

After discussing the stonework on staircases and the history of the park’s American Red Cross building (former Fullerton Boys and Girls Library), Miller had our group walk up a flight of stairs toward the upper area of the Hillcrest Recreation Center (a wide area typically reserved for events and weddings). The outdoor event space we were standing in, along with the concrete ramps and stone gazebos near the playground, was a result of the city’s 1996 Master Plan for Hillcrest Park, which was revised in 2011.

“Originally, the tot lot was in the center of the parking lot. I took my son there in the ‘80s to play and parked around the edges for the kids to get into it,” said Miller. “Well, we relocated the tot lot to the side and made the center parking. We also wanted to create a space up here for events, so it is now rentable space, and it can be used in conjunction with the former American Legion building, which was built in 1932. The city holds dance and ballet classes on the upper floor. The lower floor has a big area, plus it has a kitchen attached to it. The city also runs day camps out of the building over the summer.”

A Fullerton Heritage member on the tour mentioned that the park’s public bathroom close by the historic building had what looked like 100 layers of paint on it and that people seem to graffiti the place every week. Miller, who happens to report graffiti and other issues in this park, made note of it.

During the two-hour tour, Miller followed the main roadway that runs through Hillcrest Park, making stops at landmarks such as the Izaak Walton League Cabin, the restored fountain, and the renovated duck pond. She took us to different war memorials and monuments honoring Fullerton servicemen. Later, we climbed up a trail and a portion of the Hillcrest Stairs before reaching the filled-in reservoir area. Along the way, Miller shared old photos of what the park used to look like and compared them to what’s here now. I listened to members of the tour group recount memories such as playing by the park’s cactus caves. I learned about the hand-crafted use of natural materials by the WPA construction crews and all the upgrades the city has made to the park since then. Overall, Fullerton Heritage’s Hillcrest Park walking tour had a healthy mix of history and nostalgia while also providing plenty of exercise up and down hills.

For further information on upcoming guided walking tours, please visit https://fullertonheritage.org/guided-tours.php.

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