The ornate Queen Anne house at Civic Center Drive and Sycamore Street was built as both a family home and the center of an unusual medical story. Alvin and Willella Howe, two prominent Orange County physicians, completed the 12-room house in 1889. The Santa Ana Historical Preservation Society says it cost $3,000 and took two years to build. Willella Howe-Waffle became one of the county’s earliest women doctors and delivered more than 1,000 babies during 38 years of practice.
Her route to medicine was hardly direct. After arriving in Orange County in 1878, she taught at the old Bolsa School to pay for her education, then graduated from Hahnemann Medical College in Chicago in 1886. She continued treating patients from the Santa Ana house and remained active in medicine until her death at age 74 while attending a patient. The building nearly disappeared during an urban-renewal project, but preservationists moved it from Bush and Seventh streets to its current site in 1975 and restored it as a medical museum. It is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places and on Santa Ana’s historic register.
