San Ramon Unveils Restored 1920s Agricultural Equipment Barn at Forest Home Farms Historic Park

The City of San Ramon Parks and Community Services Department and the San Ramon Historic Foundation opened the newly rehabilitated West Equipment Barn at Forest Home Farms Historic Park at 19953 San Ramon Valley Boulevard on Friday afternoon, debuting a permanent exhibition of early twentieth-century walnut and grain farming machinery. Over the past five months, preservation carpenters stabilized the 1924 Douglas fir post-and-beam structure with concealed steel seismic gussets, replaced weathered cedar roof shingles, and installed museum-grade LED track lighting. The sixteen-acre municipal landmark preserves the original Boone and Glass family homesteads that anchored agricultural commerce in the southern San Ramon Valley for more than a century.

Inside the 3,200-square-foot barn bays, volunteer retired mechanical engineers spent 1,400 hours restoring a 1928 Caterpillar Twenty orchard crawler tractor, a belt-driven wooden walnut huller, and horse-drawn hay rakes to operational display condition. Touch-screen audio kiosks alongside each implement feature oral-history recordings from longtime valley ranching families describing how autumn English walnut harvests were sorted, dehydrated, and shipped by rail to Oakland canneries.

Beginning Saturday, October 24, elementary school classes from the San Ramon Valley Unified School District and weekend family visitors can participate in hands-on mechanical pulley demonstrations, heirloom seed-saving workshops, and guided walks through the surrounding heritage walnut orchard and Victorian Glass House gardens. New decomposed-granite pathways and ramped barn thresholds provide full wheelchair access across the historic farmyard.

The $290,000 barn seismic and curatorial project was funded through San Ramon's Capital Improvement Program Historic Preservation Reserve paired with a $65,000 grant from the San Ramon Historic Foundation. Residents can view Tuesday through Saturday museum hours, reserve group docent tours, or check upcoming holiday homestead craft schedules on the Forest Home Farms Historic Park Portal.