Why The Griffith House matters.
The Griffith House is a historic Spanish-style wedding venue where East Anaheim's residential character meets 1920s adobe architecture, garden ceremonies and a private home converted into a Congregational chapel.
Set along State College Boulevard near Sycamore Street and just steps from Anaheim Town Square, the venue occupies a garden property east of Downtown Anaheim between Lincoln Avenue and La Palma Avenue, with the Santa Ana Freeway corridor to the west, the Santa Ana River and Anaheim Coves farther east and the San Gabriel Mountains defining the distant northern horizon. Whitewashed adobe walls, a low red-tile roof and mature trees preserve the domestic scale of the original house against the surrounding urban grid. Ceremonies unfold across the historic chapel, adjoining church sanctuary and tree-lined lawns, moving the property between intimate interior gatherings and larger outdoor celebrations. Original woodwork and stained glass distinguish the chapel, with landscaped gardens and a fountain extending the event setting beyond the house. The result is an Anaheim wedding venue whose adobe construction, preserved chapel, mature grounds and layered indoor-outdoor configuration retain the character of a 1920s residence within a substantially changed section of the city.
What defines The Griffith House.
The Griffith House is best known for becoming the home of George D. Griffith and Caroline Southwick Plumb Griffith after the couple moved with their two sons from Emporia, Kansas, to Anaheim in August 1928. Caroline carried an unusually deep Congregational lineage into California: her grandfather helped establish a Congregational church in Ashtabula, Ohio, connected with the Underground Railroad, and her father, Preston B. Plumb, left Ohio for Kansas during the conflict over slavery before helping found Emporia, serving in the Civil War and later entering the United States Senate. The Griffith family settled into a Spanish-style adobe residence then reached by a dirt approach from Placentia Avenue, the roadway subsequently renamed State College Boulevard. Orange-tree cross sections formed the entry flooring, red tile extended through the kitchen and hallway and heavy ceiling beams gave the living room the proportions that later supported its religious conversion. Auxiliary buildings shared the adobe construction and red-tile roofing of the residence, and strong blue trim surrounded windows and doors in reference to a Spanish tradition associating the color with truth and protection. Caroline's charitable work included volunteering in a tuberculosis ward and bringing food to unhoused people, extending the religious commitments of her upbringing into her adult life in Anaheim.
Widowed after her sons had grown, Caroline Griffith transferred part of the property and its buildings debt-free in 1957 to four Congregational ministers charged with creating a new church. Rev. Perry Schrock, Rev. Harry Butman, Rev. Niedringhaus and Rev. Raymond Waser held title during the congregation's formation, connecting the Anaheim project with the Congregational tradition Caroline had inherited in Ohio and Kansas. Reverend Vernon became the first pastor of Anaheim Community Congregational Church in 1958, and the Griffith living room became the congregation's first worship room. Twelve adults, five children and one infant assembled there for the inaugural service on March 9, 1958. Four months later, 83 people signed as charter members, and the congregation incorporated the following January after the trustees transferred control. The former family residence entered a second life through religious use decades before its later development as a wedding property, preserving a direct connection between Caroline Griffith's donation and the ceremonies held across the grounds.
How The Griffith House fits.
The Griffith House works as the anchor for an outing connecting Anaheim's nineteenth-century founding, citrus-era prosperity and the industrial infrastructure that carried the city's agricultural economy into the twentieth century.
Begin at Mother Colony House, built in 1857 by surveyor George Hansen after the Los Angeles Vineyard Society appointed him superintendent of the fifty-member German colony that founded Anaheim. Hansen used the three-room redwood cottage as both residence and office as he laid out the settlement, whose vineyards grew into the largest in California before disease devastated them in 1885 and accelerated the colony's turn toward citrus. Señora Vicenta Sepulveda de Carrillo acquired the house in 1872, and subsequent associations included Polish actress Helena Modjeska and novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz before preservationists saved the building from demolition, moved it in 1929 and secured its designation as California Historical Landmark No. 201. Continue to Woelke-Stoffel House, the two-story Queen Anne residence built in 1894 during Anaheim's citrus expansion and preserved beside the earlier cottage at Founders' Park. German immigrant John Gottlieb Woelke arrived in Anaheim after building a restaurant career in Chicago, and his elaborate residence represented the prosperity that followed the colony's agricultural transition from grapes toward citrus. Its survival beside Hansen's much smaller 1857 cottage places two sharply different phases of Anaheim domestic architecture within the same grounds, and both houses entered the National Register of Historic Places in 2013. Conclude at Anaheim Packing House, completed in 1919 for the Anaheim Orange and Lemon Association during the period when citrus dominated the local economy. The Spanish Colonial Revival building processed fruit for the Sunkist cooperative and survives as Anaheim's sole remaining citrus packing house, preserving an industrial counterpart to the residences created during the agricultural eras represented at Founders' Park. Rehabilitation converted the 42,000-square-foot structure into a food hall that opened in 2014, and the former packing plant entered the National Register of Historic Places in 2015. The progression moves from George Hansen's first Anaheim residence through a Queen Anne house built during the citrus boom and culminates inside the surviving packing plant where that agricultural prosperity acquired its industrial scale.
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