After two and half years of haggling and wrangling red tape, a group of Gilroy activists can claim victory in an ambitious barn rescue that secures for future generations a very large piece of the city’s past to use and enjoy: the old Henry Miller red barn at Christmas Hill Park.
Now the hard work begins, they said—a concerted fundraising effort to further evaluate, repair and repurpose the vintage, hulking barn on the west bank of the Uvas Creek floodplain on the north side of the park.
That effort got a boost recently when descendents of the barn’s namesake came forward and donated money—and more is hoped for, according to the citizens’ committee behind the rescue.
The city’s years-long plan to raze the barn officially ended on Monday when the Gilroy City Council approved a memorandum of understanding with the barn’s rescuers, the Miller Red Barn Committee.
The agreement cancelled the scheduled demolition and hands the barn’s rehabilitation over to a nonprofit group that will repair the structure before handing it back to the city.
The city, however, it will not spend a dime on the barn project, according to the MOU.
The agreement was made possible because it is “consistent” with the council’s goal to “upgrade city infrastructure and facilities,” the MOU states.
Before the council adopted the MOU, more than 50 supporters of the barn showed up on Saturday morning, April 30, rolled up their sleeves and cleaned out the last vestiges of clutter and cats from the historic structure.
For years, the barn was used by the Gilroy Garlic Festival to store its many signs. But the city so neglected the structure that its tin roof has been badly damaged by wind and its siding is faded and worn to the point of rotting away in some places.
Inside, the structure had become home to dozens of feral cats, flocks of pigeons and skunks, all of which left behind their waste.
Indeed, among the items found and taken to the dump were partly rotted bodies of dead cats.
The cleanup team loaded two large dumpsters, donated by Recology South Valley, and still there was more to be hauled away.
The MOU was the pivotal piece of the plan to restore the barn, according to Gary Walton, a downtown businessman and developer who encourages and participates in citizen-led initiatives.
“Up until this point there were no guarantees the city would go along with this,” he said of the MOU’s passage. “This allows us to do some serious fundraising.”
Walton confirmed that members of the Miller family have donated money to the effort.
New supporters and contributors, he said, “are coming out of the woodwork” since it became apparent that the committee would succeed it its effort to save the structure.
Barn committee member Maureen Hunter said many of the Garlic Festival signs taken from the barn will be auctioned off to raise money for barn repairs.
In initially slating the barn for demolition, the city cited a lack of proof of its historic significance and its structural instability.
But the committee disagreed and launched a campaign to save the barn while it searched for proof of the Miller connection and brought in an engineering firm that found nothing fundamentally wrong in the structure.
The committee ultimately found a San Jose newspaper article that reported that Miller was building the barn. It was dated 1891.
Mayor Perry Woodward was on hand for the cleanup. He toured the barn inside and out and examined a huge sign that committee members and those from the Gilroy Historical Society believe dates back to the second festival, and the first to be held at Christmas Hill Park, nearly 40 years ago.
Woodward said that while the future use of the barn is yet to be determined, “this is a good first step. The barn has all kinds of exciting potential, it could be something really good.”
Many of those who pitched in were part of a family service day hosted by Gilroy’s South Valley Community Church. Jennifer Langdon was one of them.
“I really love the barn and what it represents, it embodies why we live in Gilroy in the first place,” said Langdon, who brought her son Silas, 6, along for the cleanup.
“The fact that [the city] didn’t want to save it doesn’t bother me; the fact that they listened to the people is the important part,” the Gilroy native said.
Henry Miller was a prosperous Los Banos and Gilroy cattle and land baron who owned vast tracts of land in California, operated a redwood lumber mill at Mt. Madonna east of the city and is believed by some to have at one time operated perhaps the first railroad line between Gilroy and San Jose.
He was born Heinrich Alfred Kreiser in 1827 in Germany, came to the United States in 1848 and died here in 1916.
“Miller built up a thriving butcher business in San Francisco, later going into partnership with Charles Lux, also a German immigrant and a former competitor, in 1858. The Miller and Lux company expanded rapidly, shifting emphasis from meat products to cattle raising, soon becoming the largest producer of cattle in California and one of the largest landowners in the United States, owning 1,400,000 acres directly and controlling nearly 22,000 square miles of cattle and farmland in California, Nevada and Oregon,” according to his Wikipedia entry.
