Robert McHenry's Town House

The most imposing house in early Modesto was not a showpiece built by a railroad magnate or a banker who arrived after the money was already there. It was built in eighteen eighty-three by a rancher who had been in the valley before the railroad came, and who had the particular kind of wealth that the San Joaquin Valley produced in its first generation of irrigation.

Robert McHenry owned the four-thousand-acre Bald Eagle Ranch and served as president of the First National Bank of Modesto. He was also a principal architect, in the civic sense, of the Modesto and Turlock Irrigation Districts formed in eighteen eighty-seven. When he built his town house on I Street, he hired Jeremiah Robinson, who had already designed the Stanislaus County Courthouse, and he spent enough that the tax assessment at completion was twelve thousand dollars.

The house is High Victorian Italianate: the style that was fashionable among the prosperous California merchant class of the eighteen eighties, with its bracketed cornices, tall narrow windows, and the kind of ornamentation that took skilled carpenters weeks to produce by hand. McHenry died in eighteen ninety. His wife Matilda remained in the house until her death in eighteen ninety-six. The house then passed through other hands, was converted to apartments in nineteen twenty-three, and sat in quiet decline for decades.

In nineteen seventy-six, the Julio R. Gallo Foundation bought it, restored it, and donated it to the City of Modesto. The same family that would help fund the McHenry Museum, housed in the old Carnegie Library two blocks away, preserved this earlier landmark as well. The mansion has been open to visitors since nineteen eighty-three, a century after Robert McHenry built it to show what the valley was capable of producing.