Forbes Mill Annex

About this property

Forbes Mill is a now-defunct flour mill originally built in 1854 located in Los Gatos, California, which served as the History Museum of Los Gatos after having been saved from destruction in 1982. The museum closed in 2014, and its collections are now part of New Museum Los Gatos. The building is currently owned by the city. The mill is the first commercial building to be established in the city of Los Gatos. The existing two-story building is actually a storage annex, which was added to the original four-story stone mill building in the fall of 1880. Forbes Mill was built as the Santa Rosa Flour Mill by James Alexander Forbes, who was born in Scotland in 1805. He came to California in about 1831 and served as Vice-Consul in San Francisco for the British government. The California Gold Rush gave James the idea to put up a flour mill because there were none in this area at the time, and the price of flour was running at $50/barrel. He found a location on Los Gatos Creek that he thought would provide sufficient water power. In 1850, he purchased 2,000 acres (8.1 km2) in the area of the Los Gatos Creek and proceeded to build a mill. In 1853, he raised the money for the construction, borrowing $130,000 from two lenders (including one who charged an interest rate of 3% per month), and in 1854, the mill was built. However, the milling machinery had to be shipped from New York around Cape Horn. Once it arrived, Forbes had trouble installing it, but eventually, the mill started grinding flour on December 1, 1855. The opening of Forbes Mill was an auspicious moment in the history of the Santa Clara Valley. Built on the site of a Mexican ranch, the mill represented the shift of land ownership from the Californio Dons to the new settlers arriving after the Mexican–American War. The first three stories of the mill were built of stone quarried from the Los Gatos Canyon. The top story was wood, cut from trees in the mountains above Los Gatos. In 1880, an annex was attached to the north wall of the mill building. The town that grew around this building was first called Forbes Mill, then Forbestown, and finally Los Gatos. Unfortunately, Forbes knew nothing about flour milling. He had built a dam 0.5 miles (0.8 km) upstream on the creek, carrying water via a flume to two 20-foot (6.1 m) high water wheels. However, a 20-foot (6.1 m) high water drop proved to be inefficient, so he had to keep raising the water level. Not only that, but there was also only enough water in the creek to power the mill during the winter months, meaning that the machinery sat idle for much of the year. Furthermore, by the time the mill was in operation, competing mills had been constructed, and the Gold Rush was coming to an end, thus driving flour prices down to a mere $5/barrel.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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