Browse Exhibits (31 total)
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The Historic District of 1988
How was it that a neighborhood from the Powder Works days was able to survive intact to this day?
Turns out, that’s not exactly how it happened.
Turn-of-the-20th-Century Hercules was a true company town, right down the workers’ homes, which were built by the company. At its height, Hercules totaled up to 100 residences, duplexes, and dormitories. As they became vacant and were deemed no longer necessary due to fluctuations in the workforce, they were demolished.
By the early 1980s, an inventory of the remaining homes determined 20 were in restorable condition. However, due to decades of piecemeal demolition, the existing neighborhoods were little more than a patchwork of homes and vacant lots.
The City then made the unprecedented decision of centralizing them into one coherent historic district. The December 1981 Herculean detailed plans for the “new” community:
“The developer has plans to make the streetscape similar to that of the turn of the century when the homes were built. Upon approval of the Hercules Municipal Historic District Board (the City Council members), the developers will paint the homes to reflect their design. The colors will be muted and an overall color scheme will be used for the whole area. Doors, windows and decorative touches will be accented with colors complementing the main body of the houses. The interiors will reflect the era of the homes.”
Even details such as streetlights and correct types of pickets for the fences were researched to ensure correct period detail was captured.
Of the 20 homes in today’s community, only seven are on their original foundations. Professional building movers moved the other thirteen, weighing approximately 30 tons each, into their current positions. New foundations were built, and restoration work began.
The vast majority of the cottages, built generally between the 1890s and the 1910s, are in the simple, understated Colonial Revival style featuring symmetrical designs and evenly spaced windows. Only three Queen Anne-style homes remain, with more ornate detailing and steeply sloped rooflines.
Each home was kept as close to its original design as possible. Kitchens were updated to adapt to more modern uses. Back walls were expanded and rear decks built to add a bit more living area. They were ready for lease by 1984, and residents could purchase them beginning in 1989.
The result of all the painstaking research, relocation, and restoration speaks for itself. The beautifully preserved district is a time capsule. If you wander around long enough, you can almost hear the plant whistle announcing the beginning of the next shift.
Reprinted with small edits and permission from The Hercules Express, which has ceased publication.
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Investment and Expansion
Production occurred on the “Flat” of the Refugio Valley, in rough buildings of wood and metal, each housing a stage of production from the liquid acids to boxes of finished dynamite. For safety, buildings were set in small clusters or spaced apart; many were sunken behind embankments to direct the force of explosions upwards. Rows of tall eucalyptus trees were planted around the valley to further buffer explosions.
Batches of the dangerous chemicals were moved from one “house” to the next over a network of pipelines, roads, elevated wooden boardwalks and narrow-gauge railroad lines. Men carefully wheeled five hundred pound batches of nitroglycerine in “angel buggies” over the boardwalks. Locomotives powered by compressed air shuttled freight cars up the valley, dipping through a tunnel beneath State Highway 40.
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Site Topology, Geology and Hydrology
European settlement of Refugio Valley first, briefly, was for agriculture. From 1878 the main production facilities of California Powder Works occupied the lower Refugio Valley; to the southeast in the upper Valley were small storage and shipping facilities.
When the era of explosives manufacture ended, the upper Valley was subdivided and sold as residential lots beginning in 1972.
Later, beginning in 2001, residential development occured in the lower Refugio Valley as economic values and new construction techniques overcame geologic and hydrologic challenges.