Claude Thomas

Claude Thomas
7191 West Dry Creek Road
Healdsburg, California
USA 95448
http://www.claudethomas.com/

Contact: Tom
Email: [email protected]

The lower barn (pictured above) was used for horses. The barn is divided into 3 parts. The center part has a wooden floor and was used to store hay. The northern third, has a dirt floor and was used to store plows, harrows and the like. The southern third had four horse stalls and a tack room. You can still read the name of the horses written on the wall above each manger; Lona, Prince, Silas and Sam.

The upper barn was at one time a winery. I can remember a huge redwood fermenter standing in one corner of the barn, covered with dust. It must have been at least 2000 gallons. The drains that had ran down the center of the floor have been filled with concrete. If you look closely, you can see "archeology" that helps trace how the winery functioned, back then.

Some of the older blocks on the hill were "let go" in the late 1950’s. The blocks were too narrow for a tractor to plow and our horse "Sam" grew too old and was retired to the pasture. Jim Guadani, from up the creek, plowed it with his mule for a few years. I remember Jim leading the mule to our ranch tied behind his Ford Model T truck. It looked like something right out of The Grapes of Wrath.

When I was about 10 years old, I realized that the old grape crusher in the barn had a stand down in the cellar and the drive wheel was behind the lower barn. I worked for days one summer dragging, levering and rolling all the pieces together and assembling them in the barn. I remember using a block and tackle to put the main crusher onto the stand. If Charlie Chaplin had been watching, the scene would have been in one of his movies. I found all of the nuts, bolts and rods needed to assemble it. When it was finished, I proclaimed it mine. This was my first piece of winery equipment.

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