Tankhouses of Fremont, CA

This site is a resurrection of a website originally created years ago by Margaret Thornberry, President Emeritus of the Fremont Cultural Arts Council (FCAC). Margaret moved to Fremont in 1996, and bought an old, run-down house on a quarter acre, intending it as a future retirement home. She later learned the property once had a well, though no tankhouse remained by the time she arrived. Raised in timber country in Oregon, tankhouses were an unfamiliar, almost magical sight to her; and the more she came across them around Fremont, the more she found herself researching them. At the time she happened to be building websites for work, so archiving what she'd learned online felt like the natural next step. The original site was lost as the web moved on, preserved only in an archived snapshot, until now. 

Below is Margaret's own introduction to the project, in her words:

Shortly after gold was discovered in California, many farmers, including a number from St. George island off the coast of Portugal, emigrated to the area that is now Fremont. They built their homes and farm buildings from old growth redwood, cultivated the rich land, and shipped their produce to San Francisco.

The archives we have from this era tended to concentrate on those of high status in the community and rarely mention the lives of these small farmers, and their historic contributions to the prosperity of the Bay Area is largely unremarked today. The City of Fremont is now sponsoring an historic architectural inventory project, and archiving the location and remaining buildings and rediscovering the history of these early-day farm families is one part of the work being done.

These small farms once got their water from a shallow well with a windmill-powered pump, which raised the water to an elevated tank in order to provide water pressure. The open space under the tank tower was often enclosed to provide shelter for animals, as a tool-shed, or perhaps as a spare room. There's something whimsically charming about these old tank house structures. Whether it's the angled walls which echo the bracing legs of the tower, the small size and high ceiling of the enclosed space, the open staircases or the quality of light streaming down from windows high overhead, these structures have an almost magical quality, part tree house, part play house.

When piped water became available, the tanks and windmills were no longer needed, and only the tankhouse base of the tower was still useful and left standing. Although these remnants of Fremont's farming heritage are being torn down as high-density housing replaces old farms, enough still stand to remind us of Fremont's rich agricultural heritage.

That same spirit of preservation continues today through the Museum of Local History's Historic Resource Oversight Coalition, which is now revisiting Fremont's historic architectural inventories.