City of Dublin Unveils Restored 1910 Kolb Ranch Dairy Barn Museum and Heritage Orchard Loop at Dublin Heritage Park

Heritage curators with the City of Dublin Parks and Community Services Department and volunteer historians from the Dublin Heritage Park and Museums Advisory Committee unveiled a seismic timber-frame restoration, interactive Tri-Valley dairy-farming exhibits, and an accessible heirloom orchard loop on Sunday afternoon at the 1910 Kolb Ranch Hay and Dairy Barn at Dublin Heritage Park at 6600 Donlon Way in Dublin. Anchoring a ten-acre municipal historic district that also includes the 1856 Murray Schoolhouse and 1859 St. Raymond Church, the white-painted wooden barn documents a century of Amador-Livermore Valley family farming.

To stabilize the thirty-eight-foot-tall Douglas-fir post-and-beam barn against wind loads and Calaveras fault seismic motion without altering its authentic board-and-batten exterior, preservation carpenters sistered concealed steel flitch plates onto the main hayloft tie beams and anchored the redwood sill timbers to new reinforced concrete footings. Crews also restored the original overhead Louden steel hay-carrier track and rope-pulley fork suspended beneath the gabled ridge.

Inside the ground-floor milking stanchion bay, museum designers installed conservation-grade warm LED museum lighting, a wheelchair-accessible cedar viewing ramp, and hands-on interpretive displays showcasing early-twentieth-century cream separators, butter churns, and historic photographs of the Kolb family's hay, grain, and dairy operations. Outside, a 1,100-foot stabilized decomposed-granite loop winds through forty-two heritage Blenheim apricot, Bartlett pear, and English walnut trees.

The $395,000 barn preservation and orchard trail project was approved by the Dublin City Council through the Cultural and Historic Facilities Capital Fund. Visitors can check free museum hours and school tour programs on the City of Dublin Heritage Park and Museums Portal.