A gift to Los Altos Hills in 1983 inspires the idea of a "Heritage Park"

(The area next to Town Hall will become "A Museum without walls")

 

The origins...  (Extract from Los Altos Hills Town Newsletter, Dec 1984)

This flurry of activity inspired an even bigger gift when a group of local residents - headed by Abigail (Areli) Ahrens and Ed Barnes (Chairman of the Town's Community Relations Committee) and a few others managed to arrange for the donation of "The Eschenbruecher House (Built 1908 on 2nd Street in Los Altos) and to have it moved and repositioned in the area recently designated as the Heritage Park.

After moving and repositioning it on a new foundation and repairing the roof, it became established there as "The Heritage House"

 

 

1)   Oldest known picture of the Eschenbruecher House - still in its original setting on 2nd Street, Los Altos.

 

2)   As reported in the Town's newsletter.

 

3)   A picture taken soon after the move of the Heritage House had been completed.The landscaping is fairly sparse at this point, but note on the left the presence of a split-rail fence enclosing the exhibit area for the Farm Implement collection, and on the right - behind the Heritage House - there is radio tower installed by a Telephone Company to support cell-phone communications.

“This bungalow was the first house built downtown and the only one to be fired on in World War II,” said McDonald, pointing to a modest structure, now named the Los Altos Hills Heritage House. William Eschenbruecher built the house on Second Street in Los Altos in 1908, and it was moved to Los Altos Hills in 1985. In 1944, an errant shell from the Page Mill Army Camp firing range pierced the roof and damaged the plaster in several rooms.

(Source: Los Altos Town Crier 25 Jan, 2012)

 

4)   Some years later, the landscaping has become more established, and the girder-based antenna tower behind the house has been replaced by a fake Fir Tree, which harbors a serie of cell-phone transmitting antennas in its upper branches.

 

5)   Meanwhile, the iconic Cupola which used to adorn the roof of the original Town Hall (and which had been saved and set aside when the latter was being demolished) had been gently deteriorating on the ground for a decade in the general area of the Farm Implement collection - almost forgotten. But in 2015 funds became available to restore it and place it in a suitable place as a reminder of the Town's Heritage.

Appropriately, the opportunity was taken at that time to embed a time capsule containing some contemporaneous artefacts inside it to be opened some time in the future.

 

6)   Then in the summer of 2020, some further donations of old Farm Equipment were made by the Los Altos Nursery which was going out of business. This triggered the renewal and refurbishment of both the enclosure housing the collection and tidying up the equipment itself.

Overview picture - courtesy of Town Staff

 

7)   Closer-up impression of the overall display

 

8)   The two bigger haymaking implements at the closer end

 

9)   View toward the further end

 

10)   The Pump-Sprayer Rig

 

11)   Close-up of "the workings" of the Pump-Sprayer

At the left-hand end is the one-cylinder engine - I don't think I see a spark plug, so it is probably a two-stroke diesel. These kind of engines where ubiquitous on farms for use with generators and pumps from the early 1900's onwards until after WWII - loosely referred to as a "One Lung Jimmy" although strictly speaking that was the name for the General Motors Model 71.

It is connected to drive three pumps (in the middle) each of which consisted basically of a piston in a cylinder (like a bicycle pump) connected to an inlet and an outlet valve. Each of the three pumps was phased 120° apart - so that during one revolution of the power shaft, each of the pumps would go through a single "sucking" and a "blowing" cycle but taking its turn during during the course of a shaft revolution to produce a steady output stream instead of the "gasping" cadence that a single larger pump would have produced.

All the way to the right we see the end of the wooden tank which contained the mixture to be sprayed - either insecticide of fertiliser as desired

 

12)   Looking again at the far end of the enclosure

 

13)  Looking again at the haymaking rigs at the near end of the enclosure - looking back towards Council chambers.

 

 

Here follow a few extracts from documents in the archives which provide some further background to the origins of this "Museum without walls" and some of the implements collected there.

 

14)  David Jansson lived on Central Drive (The area between Westwind Barn and Moody Road)

 

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Click on a link below to gp to another page in the album "The Evolution of Town Hall"