Passengers were squeezed knee-to-knee in a four-foot-wide coach bouncing across 2,750 miles of bumpy road. For 25 days they choked on dust, sat on rain-soaked cushions and perspired under starched collars and long dresses.

Fare for that trip on the Butterfield Stage Line from St. Louis to San Francisco was $200, meals not included, said Mark Shook, who owns the Oak Grove station, the only stage stop still standing along that route.

Shook and his father, Miles Shook of Palm Springs, have restored the San Diego County station and opened up a chapter of history for visitors to explore.

The Overland Mail Route run by the Butterfield Stage Line was established in 1858 as the first trans-continental information and transportation system in America. The trip across the country by stage was so harrowing, several passengers were inspired to log their trips in journals, which can be found in books on western history that Shook keeps on hand.

As the first passenger, New York newspaperman Waterman L. Ormsby wrote about "the vast fertile lands, the romantic passes, the large streams, even the luxuriance of animal and vegetable life on the deserts."

Others who followed had a different view. One passenger reported sitting on "fifteen inches of seat, with a fat man on one side, a poor widow on the other, a baby in your lap, a bandbox over your head, and three or more persons immediately in front, leaning against your knees making the picture, as well as your sleeping place for the trip."

At the Oak Grove Station, about six miles south of the Riverside County community of Aguanga, passengers disembarked on stiff, numb legs while fresh horses were hitched up. Shook said there was barely enough time for passengers to buy a plate of beans and wash the desert grit off their faces before the coach sped off to its next stop in Temecula, four or five hours away. These days the station is about a half-hour drive from Temecula. Now visitors to the old stage station can stay as long as they please. Beans and biscuits aren't sold there anymore, but people can bring picnics and lounge in the shade of the ancient oaks the place was named for.

Instead of the original outhouse and washbowl there is a restroom building, part of the 5-year, $200,000 renovation that turned the stage stop into a family-owned museum.

The Shooks bought the station in 1986. Over the years they have patched it and furnished it with antiques.

The displays are not original stage station equipment, Shook said. "It's just what we had." Nevertheless, people are welcome to stroll about the grounds on weekends. No one is allowed inside, but windows all the way around the building allow views of the interior.

According to the National Parks Service, of the 139 original Butterfield stations, Oak Grove is the only one still standing.

"That and Warner's Ranch are on the route and listed as National Historic Landmarks," said historian Ann Huston, chief of cultural resources for the National Park Service western region.

Warner's Ranch is on San Felipe Road just outside Warner Springs. While there is academic argument over whether a massive old barn with adobe walls or one of the other old buildings was the actual stage stop at Warner's, there is no question Oak Grove is an authentic Butterfield station, she said.

In 1857, John Butterfield won a $600,000 contract from the government to establish and operate a mail route linking the East to California across the Indian Territories. With a fleet of 250 Concord coaches, 1,800 horses, and 800 employees, mail was delivered every two weeks to the stops along the route.

Until the Shooks bought it and turned it into a museum, the Oak Grove station, made of adobe and hand-hewn beams, had been continuously occupied as a residence since Warner Hall lived there. In September 1858, Hall and his neighbor, Jacob Bergman, drove the first Butterfield stage coach along the Yuma-to-Temecula leg of the route.

It took almost a week to get from Tucson to Los Angeles, with the stage traveling day and night. Now people can drive from Chino to Vallecito -- several days time on the route -- in a matter of hours.

Except for Warner's Ranch, where there are buildings still standing, and Vallecito Station, which was rebuilt by the San Diego County Parks Department, there is virtually nothing left of the other stops along the Butterfield route.

Temecula's historic Wolfe Store, near the intersection of Highway 79 and Margarita Road, is about a quarter-mile from the old Temecula stage stop at the long-gone Magee Store. The Laguna Grande station was on the western shore of Lake Elsinore in an adobe building. Some historians say part of that building is now part of the Rancho Laguna estate near the intersection of Grand Avenue and Riverside Drive.

A plaque that once marked the site of the Temescal station on Temescal Canyon Road south of Corona disappeared years ago, and historians differ on exactly where the stop stood. North of Corona, at the Yorba-Slaughter Adobe Museum, is a building that once was a horse-changing station on the stage route, but has been moved from its original location about a mile and a half away.

The last Butterfield coach jingled through Oak Grove in March 1861. After the outbreak of the Civil War, the trans-continental route was moved farther north and the Butterfield company became part of the Wells Fargo stage line.

Until the Shooks bought Oak Grove, it was a run-down residence, made fragile by more than a century of winter storms. Its roof was sagging and a section of the back wall had been washed away in a flood 70 years ago.

The Oak Grove Station is situated on Highway 79 about six miles south of Aguanga in southwestern Riverside County. The gates are open on weekends, and there is no admission charge.

Sandy Stokes can be reached by e-mail at sstokes@pe.com or by phone at (909) 587-3140.

Published 4/8/2000